[BlueOnyx:08296] Re: pop password problems

[Michael Stauber]

Hi Roy,

> I have a handful of users that suddenly cannot pop email. If I enable shell
> access I can login under the account, but when I pop using the same
> password I get the wrong password error. 
> Any ideas?

There can be a couple of causes for this. Newer Dovecot versions refuse the 
authentication of affected accounts if they received a certain amount of 
failed logins on them. In that case /var/log/maillog should report that.

The PAM_ABL support built into BlueOnyx also denies logins if a certain amount 
of failed logins were registered. But if PAM_ABL was doing the blocking, then 
it would also refuse login for all other services and not just POP3 or IMAP. 
In that case events will be logged into /var/log/messages.

To get a better grasp on why the blocks happen, you may want to check the 
above mentioned logfiles. 

Once you have determined the cause (or if you're in a hurry) you can try this 
to see if it fixes the issue:

/etc/init.d/dovecot restart

That should flush the temporary blocks that Dovecot may impose.

/etc/init.d/pam_abl stop

That flushes the blocks that PAM_ABL imposed.

-- 
With best regards

Michael Stauber