Subject: New imap server troubleshooting

From: Joe Doetzl <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 19 Jun 97 09:47:40 -0500

I've recently compiled and installed the UW imap server on an AIX 4.1.4 system.
The problem I am having is authenticating to the server with an imap client
(currently Netscape Messenger).  My understanding was that imap users
should be synonymous with shell account users on the machine running the
imap server, but each time I try to connect to the server I get a message
indicating that the password is incorrect.  I am getting this behavior with
both the pop3 and imap servers.  I compiled the package from the
latest imap_tar release with 'build a41'.  I am not trying to access the
imap server via a unix client so I suspect the /etc/rimap link does not
apply to me.  Any suggestions?

Thank you,

--Joe

--
Joe Doetzl	                 [email-masked]
City of Kansas City             
1111 Locust, 3rd Floor
Kansas City, Missouri  64106     (816)-871-3097

---

From: Mark Crispin <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 19 Jun 1997 07:56:54 -0700 (PDT)

> apply to me.  Any suggestions?

Yes.  I wrote the UW server software.  In general, when seeking support for
the UW server it's better to contact me directly; if there's a bug that needs
to be fixed I'm going to have to be contacted anyway....

My suggestion is to give up on Netscape Messenger and try another client.
Netscape Messenger has many bugs and bad design decisions which make it
completely unsatisfactory as an IMAP client.  Netscape was told about these
bugs when it was still in beta, but released it anyway.

I am a bit surprised to hear about your POP login problems, because the known
Messenger login bug only affects IMAP.  However, my advice remains; try it
with known working IMAP and POP clients so Messenger is removed from the
equation.

I hesitate to make specific recommendations for "known working IMAP and POP
clients" since there are so many.  The University of Washington's Pine program
is an excellent text-based IMAP client for UNIX and PC; you'll have to decide
for yourself which of the various GUI clients are best for you.  Eudora is
probably the most widely-known POP client.

If you still have login problems, there is one more thing to check.  Are you
using any upper-case characters in your user name?  If so, does the real user
name on UNIX contain upper-case characters?

---

From: Joe Doetzl <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 19 Jun 97 17:01:09 -0500

I've dug up some other information that may be helpful in determining the
cause of my authentication problems.  I've got bos.rte.libs installed to
level 4.1.4.9.  This fileset includes libs.a which includes authenticate(3). 
If I'm not mistaken authenticate(3) is the subroutine used by ipop3d. 

In /etc/security/users the default user has SYSTEM = "compat", which
according to the comments :

* SYSTEM        Describes Version 4 authentication requirements.  This 
*               attribute can be used to describe multiple or alternate 
*               authentication methods.  See authenticate() routine and 
*               SYSTEM grammar manual pages. 
*
*               Possible tokens:
*                       compat  : local plus NIS authentication.  

I have installed IMAP2bis 7.8 that comes with the pine3.96 distribution and
the authentication for imap is working.  I used the same steps to compile
both the IMAP4 beta and the pine3.96 distribution 'build a41'.  I have not
yet tried to install prior versions of ipop3d and ipop2d.

--Joe

---

From: Mark Crispin <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 23 Jun 1997 11:54:19 -0700 (PDT)

> yet tried to install prior versions of ipop3d and ipop2d.

Unfortunately, I don't have much of a clue about the ins and outs of AIX.
Ever since the bad old days of OS/360 in the early 1970s, my eyes glaze over
whenever I encounter IBM documentation.

It sounds to me as if standard login is working but authenticate() is not.
Try building the a32 port instead of the a41 port.