CentOS 6.5 x86_64 dovecot Config Error Kills Squirrelmail with Connection Dropped

I bought myself a new server for Christmas. CentOS 6.5 x86_64, ISPConfig 3.0.5.3, and followed the instructions for Apache2 and dovecot. It mostly went well, but I discovered an extremely frustrating error with dovecot. The dovecot configuration files are now located in the /etc/dovecot directory. This was a problem for the (presumably) ISPConfig generated dovecot configuration files because the generated config said:

Code:

passdb {
  args = /etc/dovecot-sql.conf
  driver = sql
}
userdb {
  args = /etc/dovecot-sql.conf
  driver = sql
}

And the correct configuration is supposed to be:

Code:

passdb {
  args = /etc/dovecot/dovecot-sql.conf
  driver = sql
}
userdb {
  args = /etc/dovecot/dovecot-sql.conf
  driver = sql
}

The symptom presented was that I could get to the Squirrelmail login page, and I could run the Squirrelmail configuration test (it was declared to be OK), but when I tried to log in the browser hung for a long time and then presented this error:

Code:

ERROR : Connection dropped by imap-server.

That is, unfortunately, an extremely generic error and means that virtually anything can be wrong with your configuration. A tcpdump of port 143 convinced me that it was login related and chasing down how dovecot authenticates logins led me to the above-described mess.

I'm not sure if this error was reported before as I could not figure out how to search just this forum as opposed to searching the whole site with the search box in the upper right corner. But I sure got bit by this one!

 

Have you checked /var/log/mail.log on mailserver?

 

SOLVED (But Not With Your Suggestion)

Of course. There was nothing useful there. (I only have the one server.)

FYI, the original post was a report of the SOLUTION, hopefully for the benefit of any other folks who might run into this same issue.