I recently attempted installing an email server with Postfix, Dovecot and MySQL on Ubuntu 10.04 from this guide, but ran into a problem when I sent a test email. After I sent the email via the mailx command, I got this output in /var/log/mail.log:

Jan  5 19:46:51 halloforigin dovecot: deliver(noreply@halloforigin.com): userdb lookup: connect(/var/run/dovecot/auth-master) failed: No such file or directory

So afterward, I created the auth-master file and chmodded it to 777, but the output was as follows:

Jan  5 20:03:58 halloforigin dovecot: deliver(noreply@halloforigin.com): userdb lookup: connect(/var/run/dovecot/auth-master) failed: Connection refused

Do I need to chmod the file or add content into the file or something? I've followed the guide word-for-word, but I'm a tad lost on this one.

I'm not really a dovecot expert but it my take is that /var/run/dovecot/auth-master is supposed to be a socket where it can communicate with some authentication related process (here's where my lack of dovecot expertise kicks in).


The permissions will matter, but this is not supposed to be a regular file.

Actually, it appears that dovecot is expected to create the socket on its own.

In the configuration in the linked article the path as well as permissions are specified:





If there was no /var/run/dovecot/auth-master at all I would think that either your configuration does not match what that article describes or there are more errors (the error described above would then only be a side effect of the real problem).