recent problems with mail system

[Justin Georgeson]

Sorry for the cross-post, but I'm not entirely certain which component is causing the problems, so please don't flame me for it.

I recently started having trouble with my mail system. I have postfix 1.1.7 and UW imap 2001a on RedHat Linux 7.3. I have the server behind a firewall/NAT and let ports 25, 465, and 993 through, so the mail server is publically accessible. Relay is not allowed unless you have authenticated yourself via username and password, which in turn is not allowed unless you have a secure connection STARTTLS, or SSL connection to 465). The problem that's started occuring is connections to imap seem are being dropped somewhere. You see that you have new mail, the headers are downloaded, but then you can't download the bodies. This started off only happening to Outlook [Express] users. I started seeing "Command stream end of file" show up a lot from imapd in /var/log/maillog.

The problem seems to be escalating though. I use TWIG for web access to email. It is running on the same server as postfix/uwimap, and makes a connection to locahost:143. This is no longer able to authenticate users against the IMAP server. So I'm leaning towards a problem with the IMAP server. But I've noticed that running pine on that machine doesn't seem to get mail form /var/spool/mail/<user> and put it in /home/<user>/mail/INBOX, but I can read everything in /home/<user>/mail/INBOX, and any other local folder. I'm not sure if Pine does this through the IMAP server or directly. So I wonder if maybe the IMAP server is having trouble getting communicating with postfix.

I've pretty much always had this problem, using Mozilla Messenger

http://www.washington.edu/imap/IMAP-FAQs/index.html#7.19

Could it be related? I even submitted a bug against Mozilla for it, but nothing ever came of it. I can certainly accept "upgrade your imap server" if it comes with an explanation of what the problem is and how an upgrade will fix it.

Any help appreciated, thanks in advance.

--
; Justin Georgeson
; http://www.lopht.net
; mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
; "Free the mallocs, delete the news"