[Dovecot] Problem with passwords surrounded by curly braces

[Frank Kintrup]

Hello,

one of my users set his password to something surrounded by curly braces,
and promptly all access to his mailbox was refused. After looking through
the logs I found an entry "Unknown password scheme xxxx", where "xxxx"
is the user's password, but without the curly braces.
I then browsed through the documentation and there was explained that it
is possible to prefix the password with the password scheme in curly
braces, like "{PLAIN}xxxx" where xxxx is the password itself.

Manually altering the users password in the database to "{PLAIN}xxxx"
(where "xxxx" is the user's password WITH curly braces) fixed this problem
for me at this time, but the time a user chooses such a strange password
I would have to edit the table again. So in my opinion the {SCHEME}-prefix
is not a useful thing. Why would anyone need it, anyway? Shouldn't all
passwords have the same scheme which is set in the dovecot.conf file once?

If the feature is indeed used: with a database lookup it should be
replaced by an optional database field or, if that's not possible, it
should be possible to disable this feature from the config file.


Frank