[Dovecot] New admin, not much success

[Chuck McManis]

Hello,

I'm trying to set up something fairly simple (famous last words) using
Dovecot.

I have a very small setup (just a dozen users)

I'm using qmail as my MTA.

I'm running FreeBSD 8.0

I've got qmail delivering into a file named 'Mailbox' in user's home
directories.

I prefer not to use Maildir delivery because from a shell its a PITA to get
a Maildir aware MUA (I use /bin/mail when I'm attached locally)

What I'm trying to do is configure an SSL only POP3 server so that folks can
retrieve their email on the road without divulging their passwords.

My backup scenario is to put VPN software on my user's clients and having
them VPN into the network and then do un-encrypted POP3 from the VPN. I
prefer not to do this as it means maintaining the VPN client as well.

Users have a mix of MacOS, Windows, and Linux.

So, I can't get dovecot to work at all. In an unusual turn about I got the
SSL stuff working but not the mailbox handling. I'm running 2.0beta6

Output from dovecot -n
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
# 2.0.beta6: /usr/local/etc/dovecot/dovecot.conf
# OS: FreeBSD 8.0-RELEASE-p2 i386  nfs
auth_debug = yes
auth_verbose = yes
default_internal_user = nobody
default_login_user = nobody
listen = *
mail_full_filesystem_access = yes
mail_location = mbox:/home/%u/:INBOX=/home/%u/
passdb {
  driver = pam
}
protocols = pop3
service pop3-login {
  inet_listener pop3s {
    port = 995
    ssl = yes
  }
}
service pop3 {
  process_limit = 1024
}
ssl_cert = </etc/ssl/certs/dovecot.pem
ssl_key = </etc/ssl/private/dovecot.pem
userdb {
  driver = passwd
}
-----------------------------------------------------------------------

A typical failure looks like this in maillog:
Jun 15 22:19:20 eeebox dovecot: master: Dovecot v2.0.beta6 starting up
Jun 15 22:20:29 eeebox dovecot: pop3-login: Login: user=<cmcmanis>,
method=PLAIN, rip=66.125.189.27, lip=66.125.189.30, mpid=78871, TLS
Jun 15 22:20:29 eeebox dovecot: pop3(cmcmanis): Error: Opening INBOX failed:
Mailbox isn't selectable
Jun 15 22:20:29 eeebox dovecot: pop3(cmcmanis): Error: Couldn't open INBOX:
Mailbox isn't selectable
Jun 15 22:20:29 eeebox dovecot: pop3(cmcmanis): Couldn't open INBOX top=0/0,
retr=0/0, del=0/0, size=0

--------------------------------------------------------------

Home directories are mounted via NFS and root doesn't have access, but if
dovecot accesses the Mailbox as the user it should work fine.

I'm about ready to start hacking in additional logging into mail-storage.c
to figure out what "mailbox isn't selectable" means.

--Chuck