[Dovecot] Authentication and the wrong mailbox?

Josh Burley jburley at kuci.org
Sat Apr 9 19:00:33 EEST 2005


We had the same problem when we converted.

What version of dovecot are you using? What are you authenticating 
against? LDAP?

I had been authenticating via nss to LDAP. I switched to the LDAP native 
authentication and have not had the problem since.

Rich West wrote:

> I just migrated from UW-imap to dovecot last night.  After some 
> tweaking of the dovecot.conf file, disabling xinetd's entries, firing 
> up the dovecot daemon, and copying the .mailboxlist to .subscriptions 
> for all users, things looked to be going just fine!
>
> I received a call this morning from a user stating that they had all 
> of *my* emails in *their* inbox!  They don't know when it happened as 
> their machine POP's email off every 5-10 minutes or so, but we were 
> able to isolate it to a 8hr period last night.
>
> Further investigation showed that at some time through the evening, 
> dovecot freaked out during the authentication phase and for some 
> bizzare reason, when the user connected via POP3, they were able to 
> download all of my inbox!
>
> Additionally, by the time I was looking in to it, NO users could 
> authenticate via dovecot, and, hence, no one had access to email.
>
> Restarting dovecot resolved the issue, but I have my doubts about it 
> being truly resolved.
>
> I'm going to run some tests (what little I can think of), but this is 
> the first time I have ever experienced a situation such as this.  One 
> thing for UW is that this situation never happened, and I've only had 
> dovecot running for about 13hrs.
>
> Any ideas as to how or why this may have happened, and how it can be 
> prevented, would be wonderful.
>
> -Rich
>
>
>


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