Greetings,

I'm am learning about running a mail server and I set up a brand new Ubuntu 14.04 server with postfix and dovecot. I had some initial problems with dovecot not starting, and then with not having proper permissions/access to the various directories and files and pipes, etc, and in the process starting to learn how this thing works.

After searching in web-land I seem to have overcome those issues and dovecot and postfix both start and accept connections now (http://wiki2.dovecot.org/TestPop3Installation).

However when I check to see if I can authenticate I get Authentication Failed. At the time of these login attempts there are no messages added to syslog or mail.log, dovecot log entries are below.

Note I redacted my test user and password values to 'xxxxx', and my domain value to 'domain.com'. Also I'm testing with my plain text password, but I've tried using AUTH PLAIN <base64 encoded uid/pwd>. I have also tried the setup with a default auth domain, and I've tried authenticating with and without the domain name as part of the user name, with the same results. I added the debug settings and disable_plaintext_auth = no to try to solve this issue.

Here is my test command set:

xxxxx@apacweb:~$ sudo doveadm user xxxxx field valueuserdb lookup: user xxxxx doesn't exist

and :

xxxxx@apacweb:~$ telnet localhost 110 Trying ::1... Trying 127.0.0.1... Connected to localhost. Escape character is '^]'. +OK Dovecot (Ubuntu) ready. user xxxxx +OK pass xxxxx -ERR [AUTH] Authentication failed.

Here is a cut from the dovecot log:

2014-06-08 01:22:10 auth: Error: passwd-file(xxxxx): stat(uid=vmail gid=vmail home=/home/vmail//xxxxx /etc/dovecot/users) failed: Address family not supported by protocol

I figure this is the root cause of this issue and the solution to it is supposedly to tell dovecot to not listen on IPv6 (listen = *), but I did that and it didn't help (see config).

Here is a cut from the dovecot.info log:

2014-06-08 00:16:25 auth: Debug: auth client connected (pid=3131)

2014-06-08 01:22:10 auth: Debug: Loading modules from directory: /usr/lib/dovecot/modules/auth 2014-06-08 01:22:10 auth: Debug: Read auth token secret from /var/run/dovecot//auth-token-secret.dat 2014-06-08 01:22:10 auth: Debug: passwd-file /etc/dovecot/passwd: Read 1 users in 0 secs 2014-06-08 01:22:10 auth: Debug: master in: USER 1 xxxxx service=doveadm 2014-06-08 01:22:10 auth: Debug: userdb out: NOTFOUND 1

Here is my dovecot config:

2.2.9: /etc/dovecot/dovecot.conf

OS: Linux 3.13.0-24-generic x86_64 Ubuntu 14.04 LTS ext4

auth_debug = yes auth_debug_passwords = yes auth_mechanisms = plain cram-md5 auth_verbose = yes base_dir = /var/run/dovecot/ disable_plaintext_auth = no info_log_path = /var/log/dovecot.info listen = * log_path = /var/log/dovecot log_timestamp = "%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S " mail_location = maildir:/home/vmail/%d/%n/Maildir passdb { args = /etc/dovecot/passwd driver = passwd-file } protocols = imap pop3 service auth { executable = /usr/lib/dovecot/auth unix_listener /var/spool/postfix/private/auth-client { group = postfix mode = 0666 user = postfix } unix_listener auth-userdb { group = postfix mode = 0777 user = postfix } user = vmail } service imap-login { chroot = login executable = /usr/lib/dovecot/imap-login user = dovecot } service imap { executable = /usr/lib/dovecot/imap } service pop3-login { chroot = login executable = /usr/lib/dovecot/pop3-login inet_listener pop3 { address = * port = 110 } inet_listener pop3s { address = * port = 995 } user = dovecot } service pop3 { executable = /usr/lib/dovecot/pop3 } ssl = required ssl_cert = </etc/ssl/certs/smtpd.crt ssl_key = </etc/ssl/private/smtpd.key userdb { args = uid=vmail gid=vmail home=/home/vmail/%d/%n /etc/dovecot/users driver = passwd-file } valid_chroot_dirs = /var/spool/vmail protocol pop3 { pop3_uidl_format = %08Xu%08Xv }

I'm sure I've done something stupid, but after thrashing about for some days I haven't been able to figure out what it is.

Regards, Danny