Coming from 10 years of Ubuntu I recently moved to Debian on my new laptop. Largely the transition was smooth, but I am struggling with my email setup.

I am using Debian testing on Thinkpad X201, have offlineimap from git (6.5.6.1-devel) and try to interrogate a local network imaps server running on Debian 3 (do not ask, not under my control).

Offlineimap works just fine as long as I do not use SSL. As soon as I use SSL I get a message "wrong version of SSL" and a long row of exceptions.

I tried prior to moving to the git version of offlineimap the debian package which is 6.3. It did not work on SSL either, hence the move.

Querying the server showed it was offering me TLS1/SSLv3, which is deprecated IIRC. I guess, but am unable to figure out that python-openssl (the library providing SSL to offlineimap) does not support SSL v3.

I will be back on the network I try to access in a few days, so I will not be able to report back before Friday or so.

Any suggestions? Many thanks.

Perhaps you could try installing Evolution, or Thunderbird. The installation process of these may ( should ) bring along whatever is needed for the latest ssl version, no ?

Just a thought.

Simply curious, but what exactly does offlineimap do for you that TB or Evolution could not ? Afer a quick glance at the website of offlineimap, I must be missing something. An IMAP server already does sync across multiple clients - so what is the attraction ?


Good luck !

Hi,

I suggest you contact whoever administers the IMAP server and tell them about the serious security issues using SSL3. See for example https://www.debian.org/security/2014/dsa-3053 Regardless, Debian 3 is completely unsupported.

If the argument for not upgrading the server is along the lines of "this machine is on an internal network that is considered 'safe'" then I guess it would imply that SSL is not needed at all and therefore you don't need to use is. Note that I think this is a completely unsatisfactory approach.

If however you do need SSL, then you should not be using SSL3.

Evo2.