On Wednesday 08 Aug 2007, you wrote:

On Wednesday 08 Aug 2007, you wrote:

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On Wed, 2007-08-08 at 21:19 +0100, Anne Wilson wrote:

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On Wednesday 08 Aug 2007, you wrote:

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On Wed, 2007-08-08 at 19:45 +0100, Anne Wilson wrote:

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dovecot: Aug 08 18:50:11 Error: IMAP(anne): Ambiguous mail location setting, don't know what to do with it: /home/anne/Maildir (try prefixing it with mbox: or maildir:)

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I tried adding maildir:, but it made no difference.

That should fix it. Did you forget to restart Dovecot? Or did you check if the error message had changed?

You're right, of course - I had forgotten to restart. However, now I have

telnet localhost 143 Trying 127.0.0.1... telnet: connect to address 127.0.0.1: Connection refused telnet: Unable to connect to remote host: Connection refused

That means Dovecot didn't start. It most likely wrote an error message to logs.

[root@david program]# service dovecot status dovecot dead but subsys locked

Hmm -

dovecot: Aug 08 21:15:47 Warning: Killed with signal 15 dovecot: Aug 08 21:15:51 Error: Auth process died too early - shutting down dovecot: Aug 08 21:15:51 Error: auth(default): Unknown userdb driver '/etc/passwd' (typo, or Dovecot was built without support for it? Check with dovecot --build-options) dovecot: Aug 08 21:15:51 Error: child 30279 (auth) returned error 89

It's 10pm here, and I've wrestled with this most of the day. I'll be back to it in the morning, but I'm really tired now, and the brain is seizing up. :-) Any help you can give, I'll follow it up and report back. Thanks

OK - I did the check, which returned

dovecot --build-options Build options: ioloop=poll notify=inotify ipv6 openssl SQL drivers: mysql Passdb: checkpassword pam passwd passwd-file shadow sql Userdb: checkpassword passwd prefetch passwd-file sql static

so it has to be my config file. I'll try again to read up on this, but I'll be glad of any help available.

Anne