imap doesn't like my passwd

I spent days on this problem. I have dovecot setup to use SSL and IMAP. I also have a pop account that I had no trouble getting working. Both use PAM authentication on Linux. openssl s_client -connect localhost:993 a login test_user test_secure_password The response I got back was: a BAD Invalid characters in atom

I changed the password to "abc" and it worked.

The secure password used to work but it was a different architecture (x86_64 I think). The current architecture is armhf. It may be different versions of the software too.

Dovecot v2.1.7