This bug was reported to Debian but I feel it is an upstream issue.

On Sat, 4 Jan 2003, Amelia A Lewis wrote:

If dovecot is misconfigured, such that imap-auth cannot find passwd.imap (which probably needs to get copied; maybe need more docco in the config file? This happens if the digest-md5 auth method is uncommented and the auth_userinfo is set to passwd-file /etc/passwd.imap), imap-auth dies once a second with error 89, which it reports to imap-master, and both log to syslog.

I've got 30,000 line pairs from a ten hour run. I would think that if it dies more than, say, a thousand times in a single hour, imap-master maybe ought to consider that there's a serious configuration problem preventing use, and exit instead of continuing to fill the log.

Granted, it's a shoot-yourself sort of error. But still ... after a certain point, the program ought to be able to die *gracefully* if the sysadmin has shot it, by accident or not.

Personally, I would be even stricter than Amelia is suggesting. If there is a serious configuration error, dovecot should die immediately.

-- Jaldhar H. Vyas <jaldhar@debian.org>