I am a web developer who's without a sys admin. So far I have been successful in installing linux, apache and mysql.

I have installed Postfix and am able to send and receive mail. Now I have installed Dovecot for IMAP and POP so that I can check mail remotely from mail clients. I have got Dovecot running but am unable to login to any accounts and it is giving me this error message:

-ERR Plaintext authentication disabled.

My question is: Is this a setting I need to fix in the Dovecot.conf file or postfix main.cf or on my linux installation?

Any direction and info greatly appreciated.

-J

Its in dovecot.conf, the sample file is very well dcumented so you should be able to work out what you need to do.

Okay I found the setting that allows plaintext login. I know turing it on is a big no no but I just want to get IMAP to work first. Now it will accept my plaintext password for login but I get this error message:

NO Authentication failed.

I am positive that I am putting in the correct logins and passwords so it seems IMAP is not getting the correct info somehow. I am just testing out system users now so the:

ssl_disable = yes
mechanisms = plain
userdb = passwd
passdb = pam
user = root
ssl_requires_client_cert = no

I don't have SSL setup. Is it possible to use Dovecot without it? All the online howto guides I used never mention anything about using SSL.

Am I missing something here, all guides show minimal dovecot.conf changes to get it to work, I've read the thing over and over for days and can't seem to get it to work. Help!

I could start from a fresh dovecot.conf file if I knew just which settings need to be uncommemted.

Muchas gracias.
-J

Turn on plain text logins to check that your imap server is working and such like, you can then worry about ssl and certificates after. Most of the rest of the internet (ISPs, yahoo) are still using plain text logins for pop3 and imap.

I never bothered with ssl but then again my imap server only listens on the loopback interface.

Thanks for all your help.

Do I turn on plain text login on my linux server in general or just in Dovecot? I have done it in Dovecot through the conf file.

If I need to do it in linux, what file do i need to modify to turn it on? I told you I was a newbie.

Thanks.
-J

Just in dovecot.conf

Thanks for the help. I was finally able to get it working. I believe I had to uncomment out this line:

auth_username_chars = abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ01234567890.-_@

Now I can check mail via imap on a client machine but I cannot send mail through SMTP. There is no mention of SMTP in the dovecot.conf file, so do I need to fix something on the Postfix server?

I can send mail directly from the server so I know postfix is working. Also all my mail is coming from username"@localhost.localdomain", the username is correct but how do I get it to show my real domain?

Thank you in advance.

-J

you need to look in the postfix configuration files how to set the domain which mail comes from is documented in there. In order to send mail you will have to set up postfix to relay mail from remote host to remote host aswell as the default remote to local and local to remote, this is probably documented in the postfix configuration file, however make sure you require authentication before relaying mail from remote host to remote host otherwise your box will be used to send spam