The attached patch should be the last feature I want to get in

The attached patch should be the last feature I want to get in
before 1.4. It creates a new config variable $imap_authenticators,
which is a comma-separated list of authentication methods for mutt
to try to use to authenticate to an IMAP server. If it is
unspecified you get the old behaviour - any method is tried, the
first to succeed or fail ends the auth loop.

(From Brendan Cully.)