Collecting email with Thunderbird

Virtualmin
1

Hi all

I have a bit of a problem that I have been unable to solve by reading the forums. I have Webmin version 1.500 with Virtualmin on Ubuntu Linux 9.04. I am having a mail problem. I can send and receive mail if I use the mail facility in Webmin or Usermin. But I want to be able to use Thunderbird to send and receive mail.

When I try to connect to collect mail with Thunderbird I get the following error

Could not connect to the server mail.myemail.mydomin.com; the connection was refused

OR
If I try connecting with telnet on localhost port 110 I get the following error

connection refused.

The really interesting thing is that when sending and receiving mail with Webmin or Usermin the logs reflect the transmission of the mail. But when I try to use Thunderbird there are no logs produced.

Any one have any ideas?

2

Howdy,

Howdy,

First off, I wanted to mention that as detailed in the installation notes, Ubuntu 9.04 isn’t supported by the installer :slight_smile: So you may run into issues using an Ubuntu version other than 8.04 (and 10.04 when it comes out in April).

It sounds like you’re seeing issues related to Dovecot – if port 110 isn’t answer, I’d look into making sure Dovecot is working properly.

If you run:

/etc/init.d/dovecot start

Does that help?

If not, does anything show up in the mail logs, in /var/log/mail.log?

-Eric

3

Hi Eric

Thanks for getting back so quick. I thought that dovecot may be the problem, and when it was not logging anything in /var/log/mail.log I went looking for help and found http://wiki.dovecot.org/Logging. So I went to the configuration file and changed the following lines to

log_path = /var/log/dovecot.log
info_log_path = /var/log/dovecot-info.log

verbose_ssl = yes
auth_verbose = yes
auth_debug = yes

and then restarted dovecot. According to the dovecot wiki this should make force dovecot to log all errors verbosity in the two log files mentioned above. The only entries in the log file are

dovecot: 2010-03-30 00:47:08 Info: dovecot v1.1.11 starting up (core dumps disabled)
dovecot: 2010-03-30 00:47:10 Info: auth(default): new auth connection: pid=29023
dovecot: 2010-03-30 00:47:10 Info: auth(default): new auth connection: pid=29022
dovecot: 2010-03-30 00:47:10 Info: auth(default): new auth connection: pid=29024
dovecot: 2010-03-30 00:47:10 Info: auth(default): new auth connection: pid=29026
dovecot: 2010-03-30 00:47:10 Info: auth(default): new auth connection: pid=29025
dovecot: 2010-03-30 00:47:10 Info: auth(default): new auth connection: pid=29027

just after I restarted dovecot.

As a note: I noticed while editing /etc/dovecot/dovecot.conf that almost every line in the file in commented out (#). In fact the only lines not commented out are below. Is that the way it should be?

protocols = imap pop3 imaps pop3s
listen =
log_path = /var/log/dovecot.log
info_log_path = /var/log/dovecot-info.log
log_timestamp = "%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S "
ssl_listen =
verbose_ssl = yes
mail_privileged_group = mail
protocol imap {
}
protocol pop3 {
pop3_uidl_format = %08Xu%08Xv
}
protocol managesieve {
sieve=~/.dovecot.sieve
sieve_storage=~/sieve
}
auth_verbose = yes
auth_debug = yes
auth default {
mechanisms = plain
passdb pam {
}
userdb passwd {
}
user = root
}
dict {
}
plugin {
}

Thanks for your help.
Allan

4

I have been able to take a step forward. I can now receive email using Thunderbird. To achieve this I made the following changes to /etc/dovecot/dovecot.conf. I changed

listen =

to

listen = *

and then in Wenmin> Servers> Dovecot IMAP/POP3 Server> SSL Configuration. I set Disallow plaintext authentication in non-SSL mode? to No. Then when I clicked Get Mail in Thunderbird all emails in my in box came streaming down.

But not quite there yet.

I am not able to send mail out from Thunderbird. The out going setting in thunderbird are

Server Name: mail.mydomin.com
port: 25
Username: my.webmin.user.name

The Server Name and Username are the same as used to Get Mail. The port is different so I guess there is something in Postfix that I have to adjust?

5

I forgot to mention that I am now getting errors in the log files, see below. Also if there is a better configuration (security wise) please let me know.

Mar 31 00:58:59 MYSERVER postfix/smtpd[10655]: warning: unknown[192.xxx.xxx.xxx]: SASL PLAIN authentication failed: authentication failure
Mar 31 00:58:59 MYSERVER postfix/smtpd[10655]: warning: SASL authentication problem: unable to open Berkeley db /etc/sasldb2: No such file or directory
Mar 31 00:58:59 MYSERVER postfix/smtpd[10655]: warning: SASL authentication problem: unable to open Berkeley db /etc/sasldb2: No such file or directory
Mar 31 00:58:59 MYSERVER postfix/smtpd[10655]: warning: SASL authentication problem: unable to open Berkeley db /etc/sasldb2: No such file or directory
Mar 31 00:58:59 MYSERVER postfix/smtpd[10655]: warning: SASL authentication problem: unable to open Berkeley db /etc/sasldb2: No such file or directory
Mar 31 00:58:59 MYSERVER postfix/smtpd[10655]: warning: SASL authentication problem: unable to open Berkeley db /etc/sasldb2: No such file or directory
Mar 31 00:58:59 MYSERVER postfix/smtpd[10655]: warning: SASL authentication problem: unable to open Berkeley db /etc/sasldb2: No such file or directory
Mar 31 00:58:59 MYSERVER postfix/smtpd[10655]: warning: unknown[192.xxx.xxx.xxx]: SASL LOGIN authentication failed: authentication failure
Mar 31 00:59:01 MYSERVER postfix/smtpd[10655]: disconnect from unknown[192.xxx.xxxx.xxx]

Thanks
Allan

6

Howdy,

Well, just remember that you’ll likely need to do quite a bit of manual configuration since you’re using a distro that’s not supported by the installer. It likely wasn’t able to install a number of dependencies, nor could it do the normal configuration that it does.

My first guess above is that you’re missing saslauthd, or related sasl tools.

You may also need to configure Postfix to use the saslauthd daemon for handling SMTP authentication. You can see what all the installer normally does in that realm by viewing the contents of this particular script:

http://software.virtualmin.com/lib/mail-setup.pl

I don’t recommend running that, but you can use what you see in it to help configure your system.

-Eric

7

Hi Eric
Thanks for the info. I want to start by saying I am open to suggestions even if it means more work for me in the short term. So with that in mind.

Are you saying that as well as saslauthd, and related sasl tools being missing (which they seem to be) there could be some/lots of other dependencies also missing through out the rest of the Webmin/Virtualmin setup or is it likely/possible that they are the only missing dependencies?

If the answer to that is “there could be some/lots of other dependencies also missing” then would the best cause of action be to cut my losses and when the new ubuntu is available reinstall every thing from scratch or is there less work in trying to fix the problems? Particularly considering the amount of setup that I have already carried out.

Sorry for the complicated questions.
Allan

8

Hi Eric
I will save you trying to answer the questions above. And for the benefit any one who is reading this, what I did is, I set up a virtual machine on a computer attached to my network and then installed ubuntu 8.04 and made sure I used a fully qualified domain name. Then I used install.sh to install and setup Webmin, Virtualmin and Usermin. I then compared the install.sh installation with the Webmin, Virtualmin and Usermin installation that I had previously installed manually.

The first point is that the install.sh installation installed and configured more than 95% of the modules that I had installed and configured manually. But it configured them correctly where as I am still having problems with my manual installation. Also install.sh competed the instillation and setup in under 30 minutes. Where as the manual installation took me about 30 hours.

I still believe there is about 2 to 3 hours of work the fine tune the install.sh installation but that is a lot better than before.

Allan