Whoohoo! I have finally managed to synchronize my Exim and Cyrus authentications using SASL

Note: If more than one of the above terms mean absolutely nothing to you, please skip this entry, thank you ;-) Any readers using Exim and Cyrus (and my stats tell me some of you are!) please continue...

Okay, now that almost everybody has left, please come closer, then I don't have to shout. Thank you!

Where was I? Oh, yes, SASL, Exim and Cyrus. Well, what has been bugging me was that I basically had to keep two separate authentication schemes, so that my mail users could use the same credentials for both collecting and sending email (quite a common requirement).

But in order to make SASL work at all with Cyrus I had to use its auxprop mechanism, which in turn is not supported by Exim which will only talk to the saslauthd daemon. And today I finally found out, how to get saslauthd to work. Now I was able to change Cyrus to use that instead of auxprop (both methods still use the sasldb2 file so I didn't have to change any of the credentials.

Once that was accomplished, getting Exim to use saslauthd was a walk in the park.

In case you are interested to reproduce that setup, I have updated the Exim and Cyrus recipes of my cookbook.