So I decided to make a mailserver for kybernesis.com, and went to google-world and searched around some to see what I could find of tutorials/howtos or help for this.

After some… Errrr.. Rather, A lot! of browsing around and reading tutorials & howtos up and down, I settled on going for a Postfix, courier-imap, clamav, Spamassassin, amavis & TLS build.
And I found a neato tutorial for it too!! Written by the Linux guru, Falko Timme @ Howtoforge[^].

The howto was incredibly easy to follow, and it was one of the few really updated ones out there, that also told you how to do this with debian packages.
I tried some other howtos too, but they all ended up in me starting over again, with a new one. Till I found this one, which let me set it all up and tweak it to something I was satisfied with, during one evening. I also added squirrelmail which added new challenges, but wasn’t that hard to get working once I got the hang of it.

I ran into several problems though, but that was not because of Falko’s howto, but due to me trying other howtos that messed up my system a little… Most noteworthy here was a bug within saslauthdaemon which made it impossible to start or re-install. So… I guess I should post the solutions of the problems here in case someone actually read this and have the same problems.

Courier Authdaemon bug
Courier Authdaemon: /usr/lib/courier/courier-authlib/authdaemond: line 31: /usr/sbin/courierlogger: No such file or directory.
This apparently comes from a bug within the Authdaemon package. I searched around a bit to find the solution for this one, but managed to find it @ Launchpad[^] .
This site mentions 2 possible solution, I recommend trying the first one first, then the second one if that don’t work for you.

rblake wrote on 2006-10-22: (permalink)

This problem caused me quite a headache today as well.

I would advise against editing the installation database, but would suggest the following:

The problem is related to the courier-authdaemon. Instead of removing the knowledge of the install system (security upgrades will be ignored!), manually remove the authdaemon:

sudo dpkg –force-remove-reinstreq -P courier-authdaemon

Then continue the upgrade as normal, if necesarry selecting the courier packages manually once the upgrade has completed.

Works perfectly now here!

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HaroldAling wrote on 2006-10-12: (permalink)

Ok, this is how I fixed it:

1. backup /var/lib/dpkg/status to a safe location
2. remove all courier entries from /var/lib/dpkg/status (nano it, search=ctrl-w)
3. sudo apt-get upgrade
4. sudo apt-get install courier-imap

I now need to reconfigure courier, but at least it’s working again!

The first option worked for me, the second didn’t, but I list both here in case one don’t work for you.

Squirrelmail – “Error: Connection dropped by imap-server”
This error showed up, even though I had checked that the IMAP server was up and running and working properly with Telnet localhost 143.
The solution I found was simply just to send a test email to the address I was trying to login with.
Cause the error comes from the fact that the mail directories on the server weren’t created yet, since they don’t get created before you get a mail.
Sending a test mail creates the needed directories though, so that should solve that problem.

Squirrelmail – “Unknown user or password incorrect.”
When setting up an IMAP system with virtual users in a MySQL database, it’s easy to end up with this error message.
You see, Squirrelmail only handles a few authentication methods, and I was using SASL which is not supported by Squirrelmail.
My solution here, was to keep Authentication from Squirrelmail to Plain login, while I encrypted the password in the DB with Encrypt(which uses the SASL setup).
After I figured this out, all went perfectly well..
It’s not too secure though, since the password you write to login to Squirrelmail will be logged on the server in plain text.