On Sat, 16 Oct 2004 22:19:56 -0500, Moe Trin wrote:

>
> Nowhere _NEAR_ enough information,

You are correct. My appologies

I was trying to figure out why I was having trouble setting up an imap
server on my system
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Linux lugh.boley.org 2.4.20-6 #1 Thu Feb 27 10:06:59 EST 2003 i686 i686
i386 GNU/Linux
Redhat 9
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I was not able to connect. My first thought was firewall issue or port
being closed. nmap showed the port #143 open I posted to see if that
really meant the port was accessible. After my post, I developed a little
intellegence. I shut down the firewall and found I could connect just
fine.
So being open in nmap did not mean much.
I rewrote the the firewall rules to allow access on 143
ACCEPT tcp -- anywhere anywhere tcp dpt:imap flags:SYN,RST,ACK/SYN

This is in the input chain. I don't think I need an OUTPUT rule, but I
may be wrong.

Still having problems though.
I tested imap locally and off a remote shell account using some standard
commands

telnet host 143
a0001 login user passwd (one only hopes the real imap incrypts the
password)
a0002 select mailbox
a0003 fetch 1 body[text]
a0004 close
a0005 logout

This all worked fine.
A friend tested using his mailer (microsoft outlook express) yuck
He could read but not send and got this error code

"0x80042109 outlook is unable to connect to outgoing mailserver"

My research indicates that this means he did not set his mailer to
Authenticate to the smtp for outgoing mail and my system rejected it
because of that.
That is good and means I set up postfix correctly. No spammers today thank
you.
I will walk him through setting up authentication. I hope outlook does
this I really don't know.

Finally I tried setting the Ximam (evolution) mailer to connect to the imap server,
which is on the the same machine. I used the full name not localhost.
It connects but does not read the folders or mail under /var/spool/mail.
Instead after a really long time it lists some of the files in my home
directory. Very odd.
I shut it down and and did it again this time runing strace on the pid
for evolution-mail hoping to see what the problem was. This was a bit
ambitious since I am not a programmer.

gettimeofday({1098072097, 587854}, NULL) = 0
poll([{fd=3, events=POLLIN}, {fd=9, events=POLLIN}, {fd=16, events=POLLIN}, {fd=18, events=POLLIN}, {fd=20, events=POLLIN}, {fd=22, events=POLLIN}], 6, 0) = 0
ioctl(3, FIONREAD, [0]) = 0
write(3, "5\30\4\0\311\3\300\2V\3\300\2\17\0\26\0F\0\5\0\31 1\3\300"..., 248) = 248
gettimeofday({1098072097, 588495}, NULL) = 0
write(3, "5\30\4\0\312\3\300\0027\3\300\2\17\0m\0F\0\5\0\31 2\3\300"..., 92) = 92
ioctl(3, FIONREAD, [0]) = 0
poll([{fd=3, events=POLLIN, revents=POLLIN}, {fd=9, events=POLLIN}, {fd=16, events=POLLIN}, {fd=18, events=POLLIN}, {fd=20, events=POLLIN}, {fd=22, events=POLLIN}, {fd=8, events=POLLIN}, {fd=11, events=POLLIN}, {fd=12, events=POLLIN}, {fd=13, events=POLLIN}, {fd=14, events=POLLIN}, {fd=15, events=POLLIN}, {fd=25, events=POLLIN}, {fd=26, events=POLLIN}, {fd=27, events=POLLIN}, {fd=28, events=POLLIN}, {fd=29, events=POLLIN}], 17, 9150) = 1
gettimeofday({1098072097, 594672}, NULL) = 0
ioctl(3, FIONREAD, [32]) = 0
read(3, "\226\235\376\26\22\2\300\2\22\2\300\2\0\0\0\0\0\0 \0\0\346"..., 32) = 32
write(3, "(\30\4\0\22\2\300\2@\0\0\0\0\0\0\0", 16) = 16
read(3, 0xbfffe1b0, 32) = -1 EAGAIN ( Resource temporarily unavailable)

select(4, [3], NULL, NULL, NULL) = 1 (in [3])
read(3, "\1\1\377\26\0\0\0\0h\220\340\0\210\0\307\0\0\0\0\ 0\0\0"..., 32) = 32
gettimeofday({1098072097, 595698}, NULL) = 0
ioctl(3, FIONREAD, [0]) = 0
poll([{fd=3, events=POLLIN, revents=POLLIN}, {fd=9, events=POLLIN}, {fd=16, events=POLLIN}, {fd=18, events=POLLIN}, {fd=20, events=POLLIN}, {fd=22, events=POLLIN}, {fd=8, events=POLLIN}, {fd=11, events=POLLIN}, {fd=12, events=POLLIN}, {fd=13, events=POLLIN}, {fd=14, events=POLLIN}, {fd=15, events=POLLIN}, {fd=25, events=POLLIN}, {fd=26, events=POLLIN}, {fd=27, events=POLLIN}, {fd=28, events=POLLIN}, {fd=29, events=POLLIN}], 17, 9142) = 1
gettimeofday({1098072098, 976586}, NULL) = 0
ioctl(3, FIONREAD, [96]) = 0
read(3, "\17\320\377\26\\\3\300\2\1\2\0\0\210\340\212\0\33 4\1\0"..., 96) = 96
ioctl(3, FIONREAD, [0]) = 0
gettimeofday({1098072098, 986161}, NULL) = 0
ioctl(3, FIONREAD, [0]) = 0

This seems to be stuck in some sort of loop. But that Resource temporarily
unavailable error looks promising. Could be a bug in the mailer, or just
some fundimental problem with checking imap mail when you are actually on
the server.

Not sure what my next steps are other than
1. fix outlood problem for friend.
2. have other people test different mailers
3. Check for known evolution bugs

Any suggestions are quite welcome.
Thanks
Tommy