Currently, one of my use cases is a simple monitoring cronjob including the requirement for authentication. For security reasons, I do not want to put the password on the command line, but obviously it is no alternative to be prompted for it either.
Therefore I have modified your script so that it will try to obtain the login credentials from my ~/.netrc using the standard Net::Netrc module if authentication is required but no username and/or password is given. You may still turn this off by supplying -au respectively -ap without an argument.
Please find a patch attached. Maybe this extension is also of interest for the official swaks version. Please let me know what you think about it.
Requested sluka.de#martin 2014-09-05, patch provided