[TriLUG] Mail server & Dovecot woes fixed

[Lisa C Boyd]

Well, too much to change and learn right now to go to Postfix :) So I 
decided to try and look at Dovecot again and see if I could figure out 
what the problem was. Finally I fixed it! It's one of those annoying 
little simple things that probably would never happen to anyone else but 
me :) But here's what I went through in case you have similar problems.

----- My original problem -----
I am setting up dovecot for imap on a new Fedora 3 box. Through 
SquirrelMail I can access my email - no problem. However my other users 
are getting this error message:

 ERROR : Connection dropped by imap-server.
 Query: CAPABILITY

Looking in the maillog file for further error details gives me this:

 dovecot: chroot directory no included in valid_chroot_dirs: /home/user
--------------------------------

The solution:

In /etc/passwd I had setup users (other than myself) so they could not 
go out of their home directory when ftp'ing.

Example: lisab:x:500:500:Lisa Boyd:/home/lisab/.:/bin/bash

By removing the /. after /home/lisab, then I could access everything I 
am supposed to through IMAP.

Talk about hair-pulling troubles from a little dot. Ugh.
Lisa B.