Cyrus-imap and account passwords

I'm on Debian Woody and have successfully installed cyrus-imap on my server. I can connect to it via telnet and it's listening on the right port. I'm a little lost when it comes to configuring it, though. I've read through the faqs and the chapter on cyrus at http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/mimap/chapter/ch09.html .

I've discovered that cyrus-imap doesn't read the passwd file; it uses its own user database. So I've created test users successfully using cyradm on the command-line. However, creating the user doesn't prompt for a password, and I wasn't able to find a way to set a password for the accounts I'm creating. Am I missing something obvious? (Probably.) I'm trying to connect using my mail client and keep getting password errors – which of course makes sense. There seems to be no relevant mention of passwords in the cyradm man file.

Suggestions from you deep geeks? {grin}

Schof

2 Replies

After a little googling, I think the answer is "it depends." :-)

It appears that the authentication for cyrus is configurable: ldap, sasl passwords, etc. It also appears that if you have an authentication scheme configured, cyradm does prompt for passwords. So I'm guessing that you don't have a proper authentication configured.

As a side note, cyrus is really aimed at large installations for users that do not have a Linux account. If all you're trying to do is setup IMAP for yourself, I"ve found the Courier IMAP more straightforward to manage.

@schof:

I've discovered that cyrus-imap doesn't read the passwd file; it uses its own user database. So I've created test users successfully using cyradm on the command-line. However, creating the user doesn't prompt for a password, and I wasn't able to find a way to set a password for the accounts I'm creating. Am I missing something obvious? (Probably.)

It's not something obvious. It's kind of obscure. cyradm only creates a mailbox for the user. You then need to use the appropriate tools to manage passwords. If you just want to use the passwd file, you can have cyrus use pam. If not, you need to look at saslpasswd. That handles the password database creation/management for sasl–the default auth scheme in cyrus.

--James

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