but then this happens when i attempt to send mail and this means the user gets rejected because dovecot cant find the user id in the db without the correct string (i.e. user@domain): localhost dovecot: auth: Debug: sql(admin,xx.xx.xx.xx): query: SELECT id as user, crypt as password FROM users WHERE id= 'admin' What exactly is doing this lookup? SMTP AUTH? Maybe the client's SMTP authentication is configured without the @domain part in username?
saslauthd via a query in dovecot-sql.conf.ext? There is no saslauthd in Dovecot.
thats correct, its not in dovecot, its installed on the same machine. but regardless, its salsauthd.
after these suggestions im pretty sure nobody here has a clue about this, and this is not a known problem, i cant find anyone on the internet with it and the query is quite clearly coming up wrong and the unchangeable variable is quite clearly changing. To me it looks like the client isn't sending the domain.
so the client is changing its domain every coupla seconds for what reason, surely the thunderbird devs would have found this error? and even if thunderbird is sending it without the domain, the server should deal with thunderbird correctly, the user should not have to configure her thunderbird to work with dovecot rather than the other way round ? i dont believe this is the problem at all.
the client can not be sending out different usernames every second surely. i put the username in myself in thunderbird, double, triple checked, made other accounts etc, the username changes by the second, ive watched the sql queries go in and they change for no obvious reason. Show the full logs for a failing session, not just this one line. Even better would be full logs with auth_debug_passwords=yes, but in that case you'd better be using an unimportant password (some of the base64 encoded strings contain the password).
thanks for trying, but forget it, its clear to me from answers ive received that nobody has a clue about this problem. guess im on me own. cheers bye!