dovecot - Sep 2004 - Fedora Core 2, dovecot, and Outlook Express

After the aging harddrive in my Redhat 7.2 server died, I decided it
was time to upgrade.  I bought a new harddrive and did a fresh install
of Fedora Core 2.  I've managed to get www, ssh and sendmail
reconfigured, but I'm having a heck of a time with imap.

I first fooled around with cyrus-imapd, and couldn't make head or tail
of it, so I downloaded a fedore core 1 imapd rpm and installed it. 
That almost worked, but I could only see the INBOX.  Next I tried
dovecot.

Via Outlook Express from my winXP box, I can Refresh the IMAP folder
list, and see the INBOX and the sent-mail and saved-messages folders
that were created when I first ran pine.  However, if I try and mark
sent-mail or saved-messages as Visible, I get an "Invalid mailbox
name: saved-message/" error.  And when I try and view the contents of
Inbox, I get "Mailbox doesn't exist: INBOX/".

I tried running evolution on the server, and I could subscribe and
view the INBOX.  But when I try and make a new folder, it gives me a
"Cannot create the specified folder.  Generic error"

I'm hoping I just have something misconfigured, potential due to
messing around with cyrus-imapd and imapd, or perhaps even pine. 
Anyone have any suggestions?  I'm pretty close to giving up on fedora
core 2 and installing core 1, or perhaps mandrake.

--Joe Hartford

On Mon, 13 Sep 2004 17:09:51 -0400, Joe Hartford <jhartford at gmail.com>
wrote:
> After the aging harddrive in my Redhat 7.2 server died, I decided it
> was time to upgrade.  I bought a new harddrive and did a fresh install
> of Fedora Core 2.  I've managed to get www, ssh and sendmail
> reconfigured, but I'm having a heck of a time with imap.
> 
> I first fooled around with cyrus-imapd, and couldn't make head or tail
> of it, so I downloaded a fedore core 1 imapd rpm and installed it.
> That almost worked, but I could only see the INBOX.  Next I tried
> dovecot.
> 
> Via Outlook Express from my winXP box, I can Refresh the IMAP folder
> list, and see the INBOX and the sent-mail and saved-messages folders
> that were created when I first ran pine.  However, if I try and mark
> sent-mail or saved-messages as Visible, I get an "Invalid mailbox
> name: saved-message/" error.  And when I try and view the contents of
> Inbox, I get "Mailbox doesn't exist: INBOX/".
> 
> I tried running evolution on the server, and I could subscribe and
> view the INBOX.  But when I try and make a new folder, it gives me a
> "Cannot create the specified folder.  Generic error"
> 
> I'm hoping I just have something misconfigured, potential due to
> messing around with cyrus-imapd and imapd, or perhaps even pine.
> Anyone have any suggestions?  I'm pretty close to giving up on fedora
> core 2 and installing core 1, or perhaps mandrake.
> 
> --Joe Hartford
> 

Here are a few more details:

* dovecot version (from rpm -q dovecot):  dovecot-0.99.10.5-0.FC2

* output of "grep '^[^#]' /etc/dovecot.conf""
login_dir = /var/run/dovecot-login
login = imap
login = pop3
default_mail_env = mbox:~/mail/:INBOX=/var/spool/mail/%u
mbox_locks = fcntl
auth = default
auth_mechanisms = plain
auth_userdb = passwd
auth_passdb = pam
auth_user = root

I tried changed auth_passdb to 'passwd', but then I can't log into
the
imap server at all from Outlook Express.

Also, I don't see much useful in /var/log/maillog.  All I see are
"imap-login: Login: <username> [<ip>]"  and "last
message repeated 2
times"  (this happens when I keep trying to view Inbox from Outlook
Express).

--Joe Hartford