[Dovecot] assertion failed

[Shaun T. Erickson]

Before proceeding down the path yoou suggested, I tried something else
first. I removed the dovecot rpm, grabbed the latest source tarball
from the dovecot site, built and installed it. The only configure
option I gave it was "prefix=/usr/local/dovecot". I'm starting and
stopping it via a copy of the init script that came with the rpm,
modified to find dovecot where I installed it. I did a most basic
configuration, starting with the example conf file and (mostly) only
tweaking what I had to to get it to run. Here it is, with comments
stripped out:

protocols = imap
disable_plaintext_auth = no
syslog_facility = local0
ssl_disable = yes
mail_location = mbox:~:INBOX=/var/mail/%u:INDEX=/var/indexes/%u
protocol imap {
  listen = *:10143
}
protocol pop3 {
}
protocol lda {
  postmaster_address = postmaster at example.com
}
auth default {
  mechanisms = plain
  passdb pam {
  }
  userdb passwd {
  }
  user = root
}
dict {
}
plugin {
}

I created the /etc/pam.d/dovecot file as described in the wiki. I also
created /var/indexes, owned by root:mail with permissions drwxrwxrwt -
the same as /var/spool/mail is (which /var/mail is a symlink to).

This build & configuration seems to be working just fine, in that it
can access my INBOX and my other folders just fine, with no crashes.
Now I will start adding SSL and the AUTH stuff that postfix needs, to
the configuration. If anything breaks, I'll report it and troubleshoot
it however you'd like (assuming I haven't simply mis-configured it
somehow). I just thought before we did that, that I should start from
a most basic configuration of the latest source, to provide a known
starting point. :)

For reference, this is version 1.0.rc16, built on RH9.
-- 
        -ste