[Dovecot] Problem with dovecot on home LAN

[Amelia A Lewis]

On Tue, 07 Dec 2004 22:30:14 +0000
Rick Jones <rick at activeservice.co.uk> wrote:
> --On 07 December 2004 20:58 +0000 Timothy Murphy 
> <tim at birdsnest.maths.tcd.ie> wrote:
> |
> | What slightly puzzles me is that dozens of people must be using
> | dovecot for more or less the purpose I envisage -
> | otherwise what are they using it for -
> | so my little problem must have arisen many times before.
> Your fetchmail errors look to me like a fetchmail config issue (e.g.
> why would fetchmail want an SMTP connection to localhost?), though not
> being a fetchmail expert I'm not sure what it's indicating.

It looked to me as though there is no smtp daemon running on localhost. 
As this is the way that fetchmail normally delivers, it's gonna die (you
can change how it delivers locally, but fetchmail's default is grab mail
from server, hand it to localhost smtp for local delivery). 
Consequently, I don't think it's the tool I would use to test IMAP, but
p'raps it's just me.

> Have you tried any other IMAP clients? Again, I don't know KMail, but 
> getting an IMAP client to make its first connection to a server is 
> sometimes a black art, as it has to discover what mailboxes the server
> 
> offers, etc. You could try Mulberry, you can download a free trial
> from www.mulberrymail.com - there are builds for RH5 & RH6, and people
> report success on Fedora.

Err.  telnet?  As long as you can turn on plaintext auth, it's not
particularly painful, and it's good for figuring out whether things are
actually working or not.

Alternately, turn on tcpdump/ethereal/some other packet analyzer to
capture port 143 traffic (in and out) on the server, and see what's
actually happening at the protocol level.  If KMail can't log in, oops. 
Figure out why; reconfigure/fix.  If it logs in and then can't find a
mailbox, you should see that as well.  Some of this information *may*
show up in logs, but watching the interaction is usually more
comprehensible (you see what the client expects, and what the server
actually presents).

Amy!
-- 
Amelia A. Lewis                    amyzing {at} talsever.com
Life is a glorious cycle of song / a medley of extemporanea;
and love is a thing that can never go wrong;
and I am Marie of Roumania.
                -- Dorothy Parker