Timo Sirainen wrote:
Probably one of the most commonly asked question is "Why does Dovecot just say authentication failed"? It would be nice to be able to get rid of these questions by having Dovecot itself point out the http://wiki.dovecot.org/WhyDoesItNotWork link. But how to do this? There are two groups of people here:
People who look at logs after seeing the "Authentication failed" from a client/telnet session.
People who don't even think about looking at logs.
Any thoughts?
Honestly - and no offense to anyone on this list who's new - people need to learn how to help themselves to a certain point. "My password doesn't work and I know it's right" without ever bothering to 1) look at the documentation or 2) look at a log is hopeless. At the very least *everyone* should be able to read the documentation. The documentation which will tell them #2. I mean, is it really that hard? Reading the docs and asking "I don't understand blah blah on page blah" is understandable, but someone not reading and expecting the same answer to the same question over and over (hence docs or a FAQ) is not your problem.
There's no point in trying to program in fancy conditions for errors like this. It's just silly. Even if you make these changes I'll bet you it doesn't make a difference. The same group you're trying to help will see the long, wordy error message, glaze over it, and go straight to "my password doesn't work and I know it's right".
~Seth