In article <pan.2004.10.18.04.15.26.175761@notboley.org>, Tommy M wrote:

>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.

"That depends" Open means _something_ is listening, and did not slam
the door on nmap.

>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)

RFC2660 para 6.2.2 exerpt:

The LOGIN command identifies the client to the server and carries
the plaintext password authenticating this user.

>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"

Can't help there - don't use IMAP.

>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.

You may also want to check with your ISP (they may not want you running
a mail server), and check that the reverse DNS for your host isn't
showing some dynamic address - many people refuse mail from those addresses.

>I will walk him through setting up authentication. I hope outlook does
>this I really don't know.

Can't help there either - the last time I used windoze (1992), microsoft
hadn't invented networking yet, nevermind Outhouse.

>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.

The long delay could be your firewall, are you blocking port 113? It
could also be a hostname resolution - see that the _full_ name is
resolvable, and that the IP also resolves to the full name. Often this
can be set using the /etc/hosts file.

>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.

Neither am I. but the output doesn't look familiar. I usually use
strace with the -eopen flag, and do so with command line stuff.

>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.

I'm wondering if its a local configuration on the server. Have you tried
to use the client to connect to another server (does your ISP use IMAP?).

>Not sure what my next steps are other than

Why not pop over to comp.mail.imap (try a google search first).

Old guy