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>.
 * 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 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.
 * Usually the problem is that you don't have a correctly named file in
   '/etc/pam.d/'. See <PasswordDatabase.PAM.txt>.

It says Can't load certificate
------------------------------

If the key isn't password protected and you get an error like:

---%<-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Sep 29 01:33:54 mail dovecot: imap-login: Can't load certificate file
/etc/ssl/private/ssl-cert-mail-cacert.pem: error:0906D06C:PEM
routines:PEM_read_bio:no start line
Sep 29 01:33:54 mail dovecot: child 27252 (login) returned error 89
Sep 29 01:33:54 mail dovecot: imap-login: Can't load certificate file
/etc/ssl/private/ssl-cert-mail-cacert.pem: error:0906D06C:PEM
routines:PEM_read_bio:no start line
Sep 29 01:33:54 mail dovecot: child 27253 (login) returned error 89
---%<-------------------------------------------------------------------------

You may have mixed up the 'ssl_cert_file' and 'ssl_key_file' settings in the
config file. (v1.1.4+ mentions this in the error message.)

User's IMAP connection gets unexpectedly closed while retrieving headers of a
large folder
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

And the log looks like:

---%<-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Sep 12 16:10:34 hostname dovecot: IMAP(username): block_alloc(): Out of memory
Sep 12 16:10:34 hostname dovecot: child 17717 (imap) returned error 83 (Out of
memory)
---%<-------------------------------------------------------------------------

You may need to increase the 'mail_process_size' setting in the config file.
(v1.1.4+ mentions this setting in the latter error message.)

(This file was created from the wiki on 2009-02-04 04:42)
