please help this newbie get started

[drbobllc at yahoo.com]

Hi, everyone,
1. As advised in Debugging Authentication, I turned on auth_debug and auth_debug_passwords, and now in the mail log I get an additional message:
dovecot: auth: passwd(xxx,xxx,<40AjQMFHSLVLGJAC>): invalid password field '*'
Of course neither the password I tried nor the actual password was '*'. That's what's in /etc/passwd, but dovecot isn't just using that, is it?

2. In the new debug log, I get:
dovecot: auth: Debug: Loading modules from directory: /usr/local/lib/dovecot/auth
dovecot: auth: Debug: Read auth token secret from /var/run/dovecot/auth-token-secret.dat
dovecot: auth: Debug: auth client connected (pid=3183)
dovecot: auth: Debug: client in: AUTH    1    PLAIN    service=pop3    session=RFp0lMFHHotLGJAC    lip=xxx    rip=xxx    lport=110    rport=35614
dovecot: auth: Debug: client passdb out: CONT    1    
dovecot: auth: Debug: client in: CONT<hidden>
dovecot: auth: Debug: passwd(xxx,xxx,<RFp0lMFHHotLGJAC>): lookup
dovecot: auth: Debug: client passdb out: FAIL    1    user=xxx    user_disabled

So it's something with passdb?

3. In TestPop3Installation I can't get past the "Check that it's allowing remote logins" section. telnet gives me an error:

-ERR [AUTH] Authentication failed.


which I expect, because I have telnet turned off. Does that mean I can't use plaintext authentication?

Thanks,
Bob

    On Saturday, February 4, 2017 8:37 AM, "drbobllc at yahoo.com" <drbobllc at yahoo.com> wrote:
 
And thanks for the link to that Troubleshooting section. I didn't know that was there and will take a look at it now.