Why doesn't Dovecot work?
=========================

 * *Dovecot always logs an error message* if anything goes wrong, so make sure
   you're looking at the correct log files. Debug messages may be written to a
   different log file than error messages. See <Logging.txt>.
 * Make sure you're modifying the correct config file! Ubuntu creates two of
   them. Other distributions may also have older config files lying around. For
   example add "garbage=blah" to the config file and verify that Dovecot now
   fails to start up.
 * Try logging in manually by sending IMAP commands. If you're trying with an
   IMAP client you can't be sure if the problem is with the client's
   configuration or Dovecot's configuration. Many IMAP clients handle all
   errors simply by showing you the login password dialog, even if the problem
   has nothing to do with authentication. See <TestInstallation.txt> (or
   <TestPop3Installation.txt>).
 * Are you using an older version than v1.0? RHEL 5.0 and Debian Etch
   distribute v1.0.rc15, and there have been a LOT of fixes since then. If you
   have a problem, see if NEWS [http://dovecot.org/doc/NEWS] file mentions
   anything related to it. There are also <binary packages>
   [PrebuiltBinaries.txt] available for newer versions.

It says "Authentication failed"
-------------------------------

First of all enable 'auth_debug_passwords=yes' and see if the logs show what
the problem is. For non-PAM setups it should contain all the information needed
to solve the problem. If it's trying to use a wrong password scheme, you can
change that. See <Authentication.PasswordSchemes.txt>.

If the client isn't even attempting to log in, you most likely have
'disable_plaintext_auth=yes' (default) and the client isn't configured to use
SSL/TLS (or you've also set 'ssl=no').

If you're using <PAM> [PasswordDatabase.PAM.txt]:

 * Make sure that dovecot-auth is running as root (assuming it's using
   '/etc/shadow').
 * PAM errors aren't written to Dovecot's own logs. Usually they go to
   '/var/log/auth.log' or something similar.
    * Unfortunately PAM's error messages aren't always all that helpful in
      figuring out what exactly the problem is.
       * You could (temporarily) try to use <passdb shadow>
         [PasswordDatabase.Shadow.txt] instead to see if it logs something more
         understandable.
 * Usually the problem is that you don't have a correctly named file in
   '/etc/pam.d/'. See <PasswordDatabase.PAM.txt>.

It's not finding my emails
--------------------------

'mail_debug=yes' makes Dovecot log where it's really looking for mails. Also
'auth_debug=yes' may be helpful in debugging. See <MailLocation.txt> for how to
configure where the mails are looked up from.

(This file was created from the wiki on 2011-11-16 14:09)