Hello friends,

I'm new to linode, but I am loving this service. Nice community as well.

Anyway, I am running a Fedora 8 server and have spent the last two days prepping it for Perl/Catalyst and PHP software development. I am down to the last bit, setting up my email server. I've been through both kangaby's and the AdminSpotting (new location: http://adminspotting.net/articles ) docs and I am getting a password authentication error when trying to use Thunderbird to check mail. Any ideas? Is there maybe a file that needs permissions set that I might have missed?

[stephen]

What IMAP/POP3 server are you using? Do you have log entries?

Woops, admin moved I suppose.

It's a Postfix and Dovecot setup.

Only record in maillog is...
dovecot: Mar 13 13:13:16 Info: pop3-login: Disconnected: user=<stephen@domainame.us>, method=PLAIN, rip=::ffff:68.63.xx.xx, lip=::ffff:75.127.xx.xxx

It's supposed to be setup as pop3, but when I start Dovecot I see "Starting Dovecot Imap:", if that means anything.

are you using virtual users? if so, what storage backend?

enable auth_debug, and pase new logs? http://wiki.dovecot.org/MainConfig

Thanks, here's the new log...

dovecot: Mar 13 15:25:05 Info: auth(default): client in: AUTH   1       PLAIN   service=POP3    lip=::ffff:75.127.xx.xxx        rip=::ffff:68.63.xx.xx  resp=<hidden>
dovecot: Mar 13 15:25:05 Info: auth(default): client out: CONT  1
dovecot: Mar 13 15:25:05 Info: auth(default): client in: CONT<hidden>
dovecot: Mar 13 15:25:05 Info: auth(default): pam(stephen@domainname.us,::ffff:68.63.xx.xx): lookup service=dovecot
dovecot: Mar 13 15:25:07 Info: auth(default): pam(stephen@domainname.us,::ffff:68.63.xx.xx): pam_authenticate() failed: User not known to the underlying authentication module
dovecot: Mar 13 15:25:07 Info: auth(default): passwd-file(stephen@domainname.us,::ffff:68.63.xx.xx): lookup: user=stephen@domainname.us file=/etc/postfix/virtual/passwd
dovecot: Mar 13 15:25:07 Info: auth(default): passwd-file(stephen@domainname.us,::ffff:68.63.xx.xx): unknown user
dovecot: Mar 13 15:25:09 Info: auth(default): client out: FAIL  1       user=stephen@domainname.us
dovecot: Mar 13 15:25:09 Info: auth(default): client in: AUTH   2       LOGIN   service=POP3    lip=::ffff:75.127.xx.xxx        rip=::ffff:68.63.xx.xx  resp=<hidden>
dovecot: Mar 13 15:25:09 Info: auth(default): client out: CONT  2       VXNlcm5hbWU6
dovecot: Mar 13 15:25:09 Info: auth(default): client in: CONT<hidden>
dovecot: Mar 13 15:25:09 Info: auth(default): client out: CONT  2       UGFzc3dvcmQ6
dovecot: Mar 13 15:25:09 Info: auth(default): client in: CONT<hidden>
dovecot: Mar 13 15:25:09 Info: auth(default): pam(stephen@domainname.us,::ffff:68.63.xx.xx): lookup service=dovecot

Looks like it's not finding the user?

I had a typo in the /etc/postfix/virtual/passwd files for that user. I can now connect but when I send a test email to that address it's not coming in.

I'll keep working on it. I really appreciate your help, mwalling. Thanks.

Does Fedora version of postfix support the Dovecot SASL?

I read somewhere on one of the postfix setup guides, that a user was having problems with authenticating to postfix in Redhat (don't know which version). It was because that distro's version of postfix didn't support Dovecot's SASL.

Support for the Dovecot version 1 SASL protocol is available in Postfix 2.3 and later.

http://wiki.dovecot.org/Sasl

This might or might not help.

I don't know, do I need SASL. I've waisted the day on this and am ready to pull my hair out.

Should myhostname = mail.mydomain.us or li24-215.members.linode.com?

And do I just need mail.mydomain.us for MX, or do I need one for each mail box?

Sorry for the stupid questions, I am new to setting up mail server.

Well Fedora does support SASL.

Modules available via yum:
cyrus-sasl
cyrus-sasl-devel
cyrus-sasl-gssapi
cyrus-sasl-md5
cyrus-sasl-plain

Doc for setting up Postfix and Dovecot of Fedora 8:
http://www.howtoforge.com/fedora-8-server-lamp-email-dns-ftp-ispconfig

Don't feel too bad. I researched mail servers and read tutorials for a long time before I tried to set one up myself.

My tutorial uses Dovecot SASL and you are using cyrus-sasl, so my tutorial won't help you there.

You need SASL so remote users can authenticate to you mail server to send mail. If you don't do this you either have a mail server that will only accept mail from local user accounts, or you have an open relay (read really, really, bad)

If you are using local mail you should be able to test with the mail command on your system and send mail to another local user on your system.

If you are using virtual mail, which I suspect you are trying to do, then you need to authenticate them with postfix to send mail and authenticate them with dovecot to get mail.

I think cyrus uses a different format of the user / password file to dovecot. I don't use it so I don't know, but I think I read it somewhere.

I'm by no means an expert on mail systems or how to set them up.

You are just going to have to read a heap of tutorials and take the best bits to use for you requirements. It will slowly come together, but it's going to take more than a day.

So if Fedora 8 does not support Dovecot SASL, then I may think about using another flavor of Linux. Only problem there is that I spent a long time setting up my server for software development and have that part setup perfect.

When I try to send an email from my ISP to my linode email account I get returned mail with this message.

Final-recipient: rfc822; stephen@mydomain.us
Action: failed
Status: 5.1.1
Diagnostic-Code: smtp;  554 5.7.1 <stephen@mydomain.us>: Relay access denied
Last-attempt-Date: Fri, 14 Mar 2008 17:43:59 +0000

Thanks for all your help, guys.

does postfix know that it is the final destination for your mail? (usually in mydestination or in virtual_mailbox_domains)

Well, I have the following setup...

mydestination = $myhostname, localhost.$mydomain, localhost
myhostname = li24-215.members.linode.com

I've tried using "mail.mydomain.us" instead and all sorts of other configs yet nothing seems to work.

http://www.postfix.org/postconf.5.html#mydestination

"The list of domains that are delivered via the $local_transport mail delivery transport." which means that if you want to receive mail to mydomain.us, you should put mydomain.us there.

Well, I'm getting somewhere. I used chown to set my mailbox directory to stephen user and group and it's storing mail now. But when I try to check using local client (thunderbird) it says no new mail. I use webmin to look at mailbox for stephen and it shows the test email I sent. So, server is storing incoming mail somewhere, just need to find out why local client is not seeing it.

Edit: I got it working by having Dovecot set to /home/stephen/Maildir. I suppose I need to change the home to /var/mail/vmail/stephen somehow using Postfix if I want to use the virtual mailbox method. I appreciate everyones help with this, and I'll probably start posting in another linode forum shortly. Next is an attempt to setup an FTP server.