Autologin

Introduction

Once the dialup to a BBS was successful and the modems have found out their speeds and abilities, you must normally identify yourself to the BBS. Typically a BBS session starts with an identification dialog like this:

login: <username>
Are you a listed user of the box (Y/N): Y
password: <password>

Kom can do this automatically for you and thats what Autologin is for. A word about security Allthough it is usual to store usernames and passwords within the phonebook of a bbs client program, this may well become a security hole when it comes to UNIX. In one of the next releases, Kom will take care that the files that contain this critical informations will be readable only by the owner (and the administrator). The latter could also be excluded by strongly encrypting this information, but that would require an extra login when opening Kom. This might well become an option, since purely home installation with a single user who is administrator in one person differ greatly from those which run in an office or university.

Configuration

There are up to three section in the configuration that deal with autologin:

Custom login strings

Beside ordinary characters you can use the following special strings:

The Name,Password-protocol for example corresponds to the string !W!N!W!P.

IEMSI - Interactive Electronic Mail Standard Identification

Some BBSs offer IEMSI negotion during login. You can notice this ability by seeing the string "**EMSI_IRQ" immediatly send by the BBS. If you have not disabled IEMSI, Kom will automatically take over and send your user name and password together with some informations of it's own abilities to the BBS. For a second, Kom will popup a small form containing the information, the BBS send back as reply. You can revoke the form later by choosing File/Last IEMSI... from the menu.

References

IEMSI is defined by fsc-0056.001.
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