So it's stupid computer tricks time!

My employer, for reasons best omitted at the moment, has an Exchange 2003 mail server that is holding my mail. I'd like to get at it using something sane, such as mutt.

The problem is that mutt is hanging during the authentication phase of the connection. I connect, accept the certificate (because it's not signed by an issuer that mutt recognizes), and the status bar reads:

SSL connection using TLSv1/SSLv3 (RC4-MD5)

(then after a brief pause)

Authenticating (SASL)...

and there it stays, for ever or until I kill the terminal that mutt is running in.

The relevant imap settings are:

set folder="imaps://system.employer.net"
set imap_user="mackdav@employer.net"
set spoolfile="imaps://system.employer.net/INBOX"

Can anyone point me at some documents which might explain what is going wrong and how I might fix it?

Is your exchange server running imap and imaps?

Try connecting to it by running:

telnet exchangeserver 143
telnet exchange server 993

Tell me what you get.

I can't telnet to port 143, IMAP is insecure.

When I telnet to port 993, I get:

$ telnet venus.employer.net 993
Trying 72.xx.xx.xx...
Connected to venus.employer.net (72.xx.xx.xx).
Escape character is '^]'.

...and there it hangs, which I think is expected because I don't speak TLS.

I'll just add that if I change the user name and server names to my gmail account, these settings work perfectly with gmail.

Just an update, we got a newer SSL certificate and the problem has gone away. Mutt works again.