dovecot - Dec 2005 - Authentication trouble.

I am not having much luck with resolving my authentication issue. The 
environment is "SunOS 5.10 Generic_118822-11 sun4u sparc 
SUNW,UltraSPARC-IIi-cEngine".

dovecot-1.0.alpha5
./configure --with-passwd --with-shadow --with-pam --with-checkpassword 
--with-mysql --with-storages=maildir

# telnet 172.16.0.40 143
Trying 172.16.0.40...
Connected to 172.16.0.40.
Escape character is '^]'.
* OK mailhub is for business purposes only. Usage is monitored.
A01 login username mypassword
* BAD [ALERT] Plaintext authentication is disabled, but your client sent 
password in plaintext anyway. If anyone was listening, the password was 
exposed.
A01 NO Plaintext authentication disabled.
A04 Logout
* BYE Logging out
A04 OK Logout completed.
Connection to 172.16.0.40 closed by foreign host.

*I have tried adding digest-md5 cram-md5 and shadow but Dovecot will not 
start.*
auth default {
  # Space separated list of wanted authentication mechanisms:
  #   plain digest-md5 cram-md5 apop anonymous gssapi
  mechanisms = plain

*Dovecot will not start when I tried these options. Maybe I am entering 
this wrong?*

passdb shadow { /etc/shadow
}
passdb passwd { /etc/passwd
}

Any assistance would be appreciated.

-- 
Best regards,

Michael

On Fri, 2005-12-16 at 18:50 -0500, Michael Peters wrote:
> * BAD [ALERT] Plaintext authentication is disabled, but your client sent 
> password in plaintext anyway. If anyone was listening, the password was 
> exposed.
You probably would want to just use SSL/TLS. Or you could allow
plaintext authentication by setting disable_plaintext_auth=no
> *I have tried adding digest-md5 cram-md5 and shadow but Dovecot will not 
> start.*
> auth default {
>   # Space separated list of wanted authentication mechanisms:
>   #   plain digest-md5 cram-md5 apop anonymous gssapi
>   mechanisms = plain
> 
> *Dovecot will not start when I tried these options. Maybe I am entering 
> this wrong?*
> 
> passdb shadow { /etc/shadow
> }
> passdb passwd { /etc/passwd
> }
CRAM-MD5 and DIGEST-MD5 require passwords to be either in plaintext
format or in a special kind of a format. You can't use /etc/shadow with
anything else than plaintext authentication.