net in transit here' how it works when this script is invoked by the password input page' formit gets only one input parameterthe password typed into the form the username is imported from mailconfig module installed on the serverit is not transmitted together with the unencrypted password because such combination could be harmful if intercepted to pass the pop username and password to the next page as state informationthis script adds them to the end of the mail selection list urlsbut only after the password has been encrypted or obfuscated by secret encode-- function in module that lives on the server and may vary in every location that pymailcgi is installed in factpymailcgi was written to not have to know about the password encryptor at allbecause the encoder is separate moduleyou can provide any flavor you like unless you also publish your encoder modulethe encoded password shipped with the username won' mean much if seen the upshot is that normally pymailcgi never sends or receives both username and password values together in single transactionunless the password is encrypted or obfuscated with an encryptor of your choice this limits its utility somewhat (since only single account username can be installed on the server)but the alternative of popping up two pages--one for password entry and one for username--seems even less friendly in generalif you want to read your mail with the system as codedyou have to install its files on your serveredit its mailconfig py to reflect your account detailsand change its secret py encoder and decoder as desired reading mail with direct urls one exceptionsince any cgi script can be invoked with parameters in an explicit url instead of form field valuesand since commonhtml tries to fetch inputs from the form object before importing them from mailconfigit is possible for any person to use this script if installed at an accessible address to check his or her mail without installing and configuring copy of pymailcgi of their own for examplea url such as the following typed into your browser' address field or submitted with tools such as url lib request (but without the line break used to make it fit here)onviewpswdsubmit py?user=lutz&pswd=guess&site=pop earthlink net will actually load email into selection list page such as that in figure - using whatever userpasswordand mail site names are appended to the url from the selection listyou may then viewreplyforwardand delete email notice that at this point in the interactionthe password you send in url of this form is not encrypted later scripts expect that the password inputs will be sent encryptedthoughwhich makes it more difficult to use them with explicit urls (you would need to match the encrypted or obfuscated form produced by the secret module on the the pymailcgi server