I admin the box (well, it's relly a
linode.com account running a
user-mode Linux
kernel) on which this blog runs, and about two years ago, when
devmike.com went live on the 'net, I installed and configured the
Debian sarge
courier-imap
package. I tried out a number of MUAs (mail user agents) to access
the imap folders, and settled on
sylpheed
(sylpheed's
home page is
here).
So, I created an account in sylpheed and set the 'basic' options to
protocol IMAP4 and the 'receive' options to 'automatic'. I was able
to connect to the courier-imap server and authenticate / login, and
read, compose and send mail.
About two days ago, I started getting an 'authentication failed'
message in sylpheed's logs, and was unable to read mail. I can ssh
to devmike.com, and checked some configuration settings in the
courier-imap server on devmike.com. I also tried changing
sylpheed's options for my mail accout to 'CRAM-MD5' and to
'LOGIN'.
The courier-imap configuration I had set up had this line in
/etc/courier/authdaemonrc:
authmodulelist="authpam"
which means logins will be authenticated via pam, effectively
meaning that I use my user account password to access my email via
imap. /etc/pam.d/imap contains
auth required pam_unix.so nullok
account required pam_unix.so
password required pam_unix.so
session required pam_unix.so
One thing I tried was to change my user account password and then
set the imap password to the new user account password, by doing
# userdbpw | userdb "john@example.com" set
imappw
where I substituted my username and domain for john@example.com,
and then running
# makeuserdb
I did
not restart courier-imap, and I probably should have,
because after doing those things (changing user account password,
resetting the imap password and rebuliding the database), I was
still unable to access my email via courier-imap.
It's now working. I can use sylpheed to access my email, using the
'receive' options 'LOGIN' or 'automatic'.