Re: [Dovecot] Improvements to "Authentication failed" error

[Timo Sirainen]

On Oct 6, 2008, at 3:47 AM, Seth Mattinen wrote:

Timo Sirainen wrote:

Probably one of the most commonly asked question is "Why does Dovecot

of these questions by having Dovecot itself point out the

just say authentication failed"? It would be nice to be able to get rid http://wiki.dovecot.org/WhyDoesItNotWork link. But how to do this? There

are two groups of people here:

..

There's no point in trying to program in fancy conditions for errors

password doesn't work and I know it's right".

like this. It's just silly. Even if you make these changes I'll bet you it doesn't make a difference. The same group you're trying to help will see the long, wordy error message, glaze over it, and go straight to "my

If you have trouble with authentication failures, enable
auth_debug setting. http://wiki.dovecot.org/WhyDoesItNotWork

It doesn't help for everyone, but I think it could reduce the number of these questions. I think I'm going to do this: If /var/lib/dovecot/auth-success file doesn't exist at startup and protocols != none, print at startup: If the process printed that and a successful login comes in (master process sees it easily internally), create the auth-success file. This should be only about 10-20 extra lines of code, doesn't change behavior for end users and shouldn't annoy sysadmins since it stops after the first successful authentication.

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