Archive for December 5th, 2006

Opera Mini & Squirrelmail: Beware of HTTP Basic Auth

Tuesday, December 5th, 2006

Opera recently released version 3.0 of their Opera Mini Browser for mobile devices. Playing around with it I decided to try to access a SquirrelMail webmail interface with it. It works great, but.. don’t try to use it with HTTP Basic Authentication.

I have a setup where the SquirrelMail interface is reachable via https and protected by HTTP Basic Auth. With Opera Mini one has to enter the Basic Auth user data every time one clicks on a link within the protected area. Solution: Add the userdata in the format of https://user:pass@host – this way you can even bookmark it. But then Opera Mini suddenly stops accepting the SquirrelMail cookie – rendering it completely useless, as one can’t even view a single message 🙁

Solution: No HTTP Basic Auth if you want OperaMini to work with (SquirrelMail-)Cookies. Without this type of additional authentication it works like a charm and the webmail interface is accessible while being on the road.

Opera Mini is a very cool browser and I do hope they’ll fix this issue in one of the next releases. Oh, did I mention MovaMail yet? (but that’s $$) 😉

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