[Dovecot] Just setup Dovecot and having a small problem.

[Tom Ray]

I've just installed Dovecot and am running into a bit of a problem with it.
I'm using virtual email accounts and everything seems to be working up to a
certain point. Let me break down how the server is setup.

Each domain belongs under the directory /mail so it's path is basically:
/mail/domain.tld. Within each domain directory there are two sub-directories
etc and mail. Under /mail/domain.tld/etc I have two files setup aliases and
passwd, the aliases file handles all mail aliasing for that domain and the
passwd file holds the users account name and password. The password file has
the accounts stored in the following format:

user at domain.tld:(encrypted password):500:500:Virtual
User:/mail/domain.tld/mail/user:/dev/null

The password enctryption is basically htpasswd() style encryption. Now the
problem I'm having is I keep getting authentication errors when I try to
login via POP3 (I'm testing via command line so I do `telnet localhost
110`). At first I had only auth_debug_passwords=yes set and I was seeing
this in the log file:

Apr 23 18:54:19 www dovecot: auth(default): client in:
AUTH^I1^IPLAIN^Iservice=POP3^Isecured^Ilip=
127.0.0.1^Irip=127.0.0.1^Iresp=AHRvbUBkZXRyb2l0b25saW5lLmNvbQBuZXdiZXJn
Apr 23 18:54:19 www dovecot: auth(default): pam(user at domain.tld,127.0.0.1):
pam_authenticate() failed: Authentication failure
Apr 23 18:54:19 www dovecot: auth(default): passwd-file
/mail/domain.tld/etc/passwd: Read 1 users
Apr 23 18:54:19 www dovecot: auth(default): passwd-file(user at domain.tld,
127.0.0.1): unknown user
Apr 23 18:54:20 www dovecot: auth(default): client out: FAIL^I1^Iuser=
user at domain.tld

So I can see it's reading the proper password file but it claims that user
doesn't exist, however, that user does exist. When I turn on
auth_verbose=yes and I'm still seeing the same errors in the log file.

Can someone tell me what I'm missing here? I'm really on a time crunch with
this, our mail server died friday morning and it's been put on me to fix it.
They insist I use UW IMAP but I can't get it to work with the vitrtual users
like the previous guy did. I've used Dovecot before but it's been two years
and I can't remember how I got everything working before. They want things
back to normal by Monday morning (tomorrow) so now I'm a bit stressed since
I've lost most my weekend rebuilding the server and users.

Any help would be appreciated. I thought I had this setup just right but I
just can't get passed it telling me the user doesn't exsist.
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