Fellow techies,

OK... This is going to go down as one of those "D'Oh!" moments in the world of computers. Boy, do I feel dumb...

In short: I found the problem. One miserable little line in 'dovecot.conf' called 'auth_default_realm =.'

I had this set to 'bluefeathertech.com,' thinking it was necessary to do so. I was wrong, at least for my environment, and the stupid clues were right in front of me in the logfile all the time!

For the benefit of others who may run into this: Setting a domain name in this entry causes that domain name to be automatically appended to usernames when they log in. No wonder nothing ever matched in /etc/passwd!

My deepest thanks to Frank Cusack for giving me the idea. Something he said in his post, in response to my initial one, got me thinking about things getting appended to the user name, and the rest is history.

pop3 and pop3s both work just fine now, thanks. ;-)

Keep the peace(es).

-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Bruce Lane, Owner & Head Hardware Heavy, Blue Feather Technologies -- http://www.bluefeathertech.com kyrrin (at) bluefeathertech do/t c=o=m "If Salvador Dali had owned a computer, would it have been equipped with surreal ports?"