655009 - GSSAPI smtp auth not working

Status: VERIFIED WORKSFORME

(MailNews Core :: Networking: SMTP, defect)

Description

[Brian Murrell]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux i686) AppleWebKit/534.24 (KHTML, like Gecko) Ubuntu/10.10 Chromium/11.0.696.57 Chrome/11.0.696.57 Safari/534.24
Build Identifier: 

My SMTP server (Postfix) is configured to allow GSSAPI authentication yet Thunderbird (3.1.8) still prompts me for a password to send e-mail.

I have verified that Postfix is offering GSSAPI as an authentication mechanism:

May  5 10:10:36 linux postfix/smtpd[13300]: < pc.ilinx[10.75.22.1]: EHLO [10.75.22.1]
May  5 10:10:36 linux postfix/smtpd[13300]: > pc.ilinx[10.75.22.1]: 250-xxx
May  5 10:10:36 linux postfix/smtpd[13300]: > pc.ilinx[10.75.22.1]: 250-PIPELINING
May  5 10:10:36 linux postfix/smtpd[13300]: > pc.ilinx[10.75.22.1]: 250-SIZE 20480000
May  5 10:10:36 linux postfix/smtpd[13300]: > pc.ilinx[10.75.22.1]: 250-VRFY
May  5 10:10:36 linux postfix/smtpd[13300]: > pc.ilinx[10.75.22.1]: 250-ETRN
May  5 10:10:36 linux postfix/smtpd[13300]: > pc.ilinx[10.75.22.1]: 250-AUTH PLAIN DIGEST-MD5 LOGIN CRAM-MD5 GSSAPI NTLM
May  5 10:10:36 linux postfix/smtpd[13300]: > pc.ilinx[10.75.22.1]: 250-ENHANCEDSTATUSCODES
May  5 10:10:36 linux postfix/smtpd[13300]: > pc.ilinx[10.75.22.1]: 250-8BITMIME
May  5 10:10:36 linux postfix/smtpd[13300]: > pc.ilinx[10.75.22.1]: 250 DSN

So why isn't Thunderbird using it?

Reproducible: Always

Comment 1

[rsx11m]

I'm moving this to the MailNews Core/SMTP component so that it gets the
attention of the right people. Just to double-check, you have selected GSSAPI
as authentication method in Edit > Account Settings > Outgoing Server?

As described in https://wiki.mozilla.org/MailNews:Logging#Linux.2Funix you can also create a Thunderbird log (use NSPR_LOG_MODULES=smtp:5 here) which may help to figure out what it's actually doing and if anything silently fails.

Comment 2

[Brian Murrell]

I actually solved this before seeing the new comment.  I didn't know that I had to specifically configure TB to use GSSAPI given that my environment has a TGT for the realm and that the SMTP server advertises GSSAPI.

Comment 3

[rsx11m]

Ok, good. It was changed from auto-detect to a more explicit configuration some time back after Thunderbird selected GSSAPI if advertised in certain occasions where it wasn't correctly configured or available at the server side.

Comment 4

[Ben Bucksch (:BenB)]

v