Okay,

sure it must be trivial....

I have old Redhat box, want a quick and dirty IMAP server, thought good time to try out dovecot (I'd rather it had Debian on too ;).

Downloaded and compiled from source - no options to configure.

Auth data is in /etc/passwd and /etc/shadow (as well as NIS).

vi /usr/local/etc/dovecot.conf as expected. Disable ssl in conf. Basically email is in mbox format in /var/spool/mail/%u Should go somewhere ~%u/mail is fine, as would be ~%u/Mail (I don't care at the moment). created a user "dovecot..." to run as and edited conf file.

If I run /usr/local/sbin/dovecot it terminates without errors, the fork is completing I think, and the main program returns as expect.

Running imap-auth from xinetd gets me a greeting banner, but then the connection is closed.

Trying to run "imap" directly just dies in a blizarrd of "dot locking" errors and the like, where it seems to ignore the locking directives (should I set an env or some such?), but I think that it is basically running (it creates indexes in ~/mail/...mumble) but complains about the dotlocking, and then spews an internal error (which it claims is logged to server log?).

I'm off to try auth_verbose, but any tips or hints appreciated.

I'm assuming /usr/local/sbin/dovecot is what was called "master" given it is in the master src directory.

Simon