with cyrtus installed and imap and imaps enabled on pine using the /ssl oprion it first always tries to use cram-md5 overriding imaps. There is a way to force pine to use ssl with imaps rather using the cram-md5 secrets ? That is if an user is not in the sasldb database it cannot authenticate it even if it is in the passwd file. IAlso played with pwcheck passwd shadow and PAM options in the imapd.conf file but it was not useful, pine always tries cram-md5. Only if sasldb file is not present it will use imaps. thanks Rick