[Dovecot] Waiting for authentication process to respond..

[Timo Sirainen]

On Wed, 2011-06-15 at 14:40 +0200, Peter Eriksson wrote:
> Hmm... I'm seeing a lot of:
> 
>  > * OK Waiting for authentication process to respond..
>  > * OK [CAPABILITY IMAP4rev1 LITERAL+ SASL-IR LOGIN-REFERRALS ID ENABLE 
> IDLE STARTTLS AUTH=PLAIN AUTH=LOGIN AUTH=GSSAPI AUTH=GSS-SPNEGO] Welcome 
> to the IFM Dovecot Mail Server.
> 
> when IMAP clients connect to our server (ie that "Waiting for.." message 
> before the login OK message).
> 
> Now, most clients seems to handle this extra information message just 
> fine, but it still is annoying me. It doesn't appear all the time, but
> pretty often...
> 
> What can I adjust/fix in order to make it go away?

I'd guess it means two things:

1) Client doesn't actually care about the OK reply at all, and tries to
send some command immediately after connecting.

2) You're using the "high-security mode" of login processes, which is
why there is a small delay before login process gets a reply from auth.
You could switch to either "high-performance
mode" (http://wiki2.dovecot.org/LoginProcess) or probably just setting
service imap-login { process_min_avail } to some small number also
helps.