SASL came out as a generalization of the IMAP AUTHENTICATE mechanism. CMU wanted Kerberos to work and it had been done as something of a one-off in telnet, and initially in IMAP. There were a couple companion protocols proposed for IMAP (stuff like contacts) that the same group was working on, and they wanted to leverage the same mechanism. From there, might as well do the same thing for POP and SMTP, etc. So they started working on a library (which Cyrus IMAP didn’t use for at least a while, sorry my fault).Kind of funny that SASL is the most durable piece of the effort.
(I doubt this is entirely accurate. I wasn’t there for a lot of it.)
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