dovecot - Jun 2004 - Loggin error with Squirrelmail on Fedore Core 2

Hi!

I am switching a mail server setup to a new machine which has RHL Fedore
Core 2 installed, which uses Dovecot.

I managed to get Squirrelmail to work on my personal account, but when
logging in with some other accounts I get the following error as response:

ERROR : Connection dropped by imap-server.
Query: Capability

I did a web search on this and found a message from Tim Middleton who
experienced the same problem. He also suggests a workaround:

"I put in a chron job to touch into existance any non-existing mailboxes
for
everyone in the passwd file periodically, which mostly eliminates the
problem. But I'd still like to know why the server is having the problem, if
anyone can make any suggestions."

I would like to try this, but I am still fairly new to Unix. Could anyone
show me how to set up such a chron job? Are there other, manual, ways to
touch the mailboxes?

Thanks,
Antonio Nunes

Don't let who you can be keep you from being who you already are.

On Wed, 2004-06-02 at 13:56, Antonio Nunes wrote:
> I managed to get Squirrelmail to work on my personal account, but when
> logging in with some other accounts I get the following error as response:
> 
> ERROR : Connection dropped by imap-server.
> Query: Capability
The real error message is in log file, most likely /var/log/mail.log.
> I did a web search on this and found a message from Tim Middleton who
> experienced the same problem. He also suggests a workaround:
> 
> "I put in a chron job to touch into existance any non-existing
mailboxes for
> everyone in the passwd file periodically, which mostly eliminates the
> problem. But I'd still like to know why the server is having the
problem, if
> anyone can make any suggestions."
This is because by default Dovecot detects mailbox locations, and if
some user doesn't have /var/mail/user mbox file, Dovecot doesn't know
what to do. So alternative to the above kludge is to modify
configuration file:

default_mail_env = mbox:~/mail:INBOX=/var/mail/%u

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Timo wrote:

This is because by default Dovecot detects mailbox locations, and if some
user doesn't have /var/mail/user mbox file, Dovecot doesn't know what to
do. So alternative to the above kludge is to modify configuration file:
default_mail_env = mbox:~/mail:INBOX=/var/mail/%u

Thanks Timo. It turned out that my batch-file created users were not
working correctly on the system at all, so it was not a Dovecot issue. I
recreated our users by hand (fortunately they're not too many) and it
seems to be OK now with SquirrelMail.

I am currently experiencing another issue, but I'll start a separate
thread on that.

Best wishes,
Antonio Nunes

The best way of seeing divine light, is to put out your own little candle.