Postfix with Dovecot results in MySQL Access denied

While installing a new mail server i ran into a problem with SMTP authentication. The mail server in question is postfix installed on a Debian lenny box. The backend for postfix is MySQL. And because SASL is always a pain to configure i used dovecot to do the SMTP authentication with the MySQL backend. This however resulted in the following error

Jun 21 17:43:02 ims1 dovecot: auth-worker(default): mysql: Connect failed to localhost (mail): Access denied for user ‘mail_admin’@'localhost’ (using password: YES) – waiting for 1 seconds before retry

It took me a while to figure this out. The settings in ‘dovecot-sql.conf’ were correct. Logging in with the same data from a shell went without a problem. I remembered i had this problem some years ago. With a vpopmail setup. The problem then was the encryption algorithm used by MySQL. So i tried to use the older encryption algorithm.

SET PASSWORD FOR ‘user’@'localhost’ = OLD_PASSWORD(‘password’);

After a restart everything was fine.

Jun 21 18:41:03 ims1 dovecot: auth-worker(default): mysql: Connected to localhost (mail)

Like i said it took me a while to figure out. So maybe i can safe somebody some time.


3 Comments

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  1. 6 Jul 09 at 23:20
    kocka

    on this site (http://wiki.dovecot.org/MysqlProblems) i readed that mysqld above 5.0.19 and dovecot above 1.0rc9 not affected with this problem. i have installed mysql-server-5.0.83 and dovecot-1.1.16. And even doesn’t work, when i’m hashing the password with OLD_PASSWORD().. do you have any idea?

  2. 7 Jul 09 at 06:12

    Well i actually got fed-up trying to configure dovecot with postfix. So i switched back to postfix and saslauthd for the authentication.
    Will have a look at this though. I’m still looking for a better setup then i have now.

  3. 9 Apr 12 at 16:03
    svankie

    Thanks, man. It works like a charm.

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