One server recently installed with Qmail + Vpopmail and Squirrelmail had just been reported to me that the webmail is failing to properly login existent users on the server via the IMAP protocol.
I’ve checked on port 143 to see if couriertpcd process is properly listening with netstat -tlnp as well as used telnet to check if I can normally connect with telnet to the imap port and it seemed there is no issue with IMAP
Further on I checked /var/log/mail.log and there I found the following error message popping up:
Aug 17 08:56:27 mail-serv imapd: LOGIN FAILED, user=hipo@mail-serv.com, ip=[::ffff:127.0.0.1]
Aug 17 08:56:27 mail-serv imapd: authentication error: Connection refused
Aug 17 08:56:29 mail-serv imapd: Connection, ip=[::ffff:127.0.0.1]
Aug 17 08:56:29 mail-serv imapd: authdaemon: s_connect() failed: Connection refused
Aug 17 08:56:29 mail-serv imapd: [Hint: perhaps authdaemond is not running?]
The error was shown each time I do get a failure in Squirrelmail in my browser to connect to IMAP with the error:
ERROR: Connection dropped by IMAP server.
As the log revealed the courier-authdaemond was not up and running on the system. I thus launched it :
qmail:~# /usr/local/sbin/authdaemond stop
qmail:~# /usr/local/sbin/authdaemond start
qmail:~# /etc/init.d/imap start
I’ve later on figured out the strange, was caused because of a server reboot, during boot process authdaemond did not properly load up, therefore to prevent future problems like this one, I’ve put authdaemond and /etc/init.d/imap scripts to load up via /etc/rc.local :
qmail:~# echo '/usr/local/sbin/authdaemond stop' >> /etc/rc.local
qmail:~# echo '/usr/local/sbin/authdaemond start' >> /etc/rc.local
qmail:~# echo '/etc/init.d/imap start' >> /etc/rc.local
