Hi all,
You probably know this already, but just in case...
Let's say you have your email client getting mail from a Dovecot server on the same computer (which is a really good way of doing things, by the way). Then one day your email client starts saying "connection refused" after a suitably long timeout. So then, to find out where things are getting stuck, you do the following command:
openssl s_client -connect 127.0.0.1:993 -quiet
And you don't even get an OK back. This means it's not your username or password, because you never even got that far. Before spending a lot of time doing diagnostic tests and narrowing it to the root cause, try this as root:
ifdown lo ifup lo
A malfunctioning lo will cause Dovecot not to connect to clients. My experience with Debian Wheezy is that lo "goes down" a lot, so this is one of the first things I do when odd stuff happens.
HTH,
SteveT
Steve Litt * http://www.troubleshooters.com/ Troubleshooting Training * Human Performance