authentication in gnus vs. pine

[John Palmieri <palmieri@math.washington.edu>]

This feels like it might be a stupid question, but everyone needs a
hobby, right?

When I run pine, it accesses my IMAP server automatically; why do I
need to tell gnus a username and password?  (Or: how should I
configure gnus and nnimap so that I don't need to give it a password
or have a .authinfo file or anything?)

(Maybe pine is using the /etc/hosts file, which happens to list the
IMAP server, or some similar file?  I'm not quite sure what I'm
looking for here; any suggestions?)

-- 
John H. Palmieri                      
Dept of Mathematics, Box 354350    palmieri@math.washington.edu
University of Washington	   http://www.math.washington.edu/~palmieri
Seattle, WA 98195-4350