I'm trying to use virtual domains and I'm suffering a disconnect.

I have two domains - foo.com and bar.com. On the filesystem, they are located at /var/mail/foo.com/ and /var/mail/bar.com/. Users are located at /var/mail/foo.com/john/, /var/mail/bar.com/jane/, etc.

There are two password files with <user>:<scheme><password> entries. The scheme is {PLAIN}. They are located at /var/mail/foo.com/users and /var/mail/bar.com/users. According to the wiki, these are passwd-file databases (http://wiki2.dovecot.org/AuthDatabase/PasswdFile).

I specified the following in my dovecot.conf.

passdb { args = /var/mail/%d/users driver = passwd-file }

Attempts to use the configuration result in an authentication failure. Here's an entry from dovecot.log when the failure happens:

Mar 31 16:04:12 imap-login: Info: Disconnected (auth failed, 1 attempts in 5 secs): user=<jeff@foo.com>, method=PLAIN, rip=127.0.0.1, lip=127.0.1.1, secured, session=<n5/ajez1FgB/AAAB>

What exactly goes where to have Dovecot use the 'users' files to authenticate users?

Thanks in advance and my apologies for the question. Two days of blog posts, mini-HowTo's and mailing lists has only help me discover ways to do things incorrectly.

# dovecot --version 2.1.7

# doveconf -n # 2.1.7: /etc/dovecot/dovecot.conf # OS: Linux 3.2.0-4-686-pae i686 Debian 7.4 disable_plaintext_auth = no log_path = /var/log/dovecot.log login_trusted_networks = 127.0.0.1 mail_location = mbox:~/mail:INBOX=/var/mail/%u namespace inbox { inbox = yes location = mailbox Drafts { special_use = \Drafts } ... prefix = } passdb { args = /var/mail/%d/users driver = passwd-file } passdb { driver = pam } plugin { sieve = ~/.dovecot.sieve sieve_dir = ~/sieve } protocols = " imap pop3" ssl_cert = </etc/dovecot/dovecot.pem ssl_key = </etc/dovecot/private/dovecot.pem userdb { driver = passwd }