Explained: SASL

You're wiring up a new mail server. You reach the part where clients log in, and you open the SMTP docs to find not one login method but a menu of them: PLAIN , LOGIN , CRAM-MD5 , SCRAM-SHA-256 , OAUTHBEARER , GSSAPI . Then you open the IMAP docs for the same server, and it's the same menu again. Then LDAP. Then XMPP. The same names, the same handshakes, described separately in four different specifications. That repetition is exactly the probl… Read More