Mandriva 2008.0 Courier chdir Maildir failed IMAP

[knightmb]

Hi Everyone,

I've searched around on the web, no luck so far :mellow:

 

I searched the forums here, I guess no one has encountered this yet. But everyone here is always helpful, so this is the first place I start.

 

I have a base install of Mandriva 2008.0 (DVD Image) and everything works fine. This system has Apache, MySQL, Postfix, etc. It all works great. The only issue I've run into is checking e-mail from the box via IMAP/POP3. The last time I worked with these programs, was back in Mandriva 2006, in which you used the imap-2004e-1.1.20060mdk package to setup easy plug n' pray access that works without much fuss on configuration.

 

Well, I've finally moved up to the future with 2008.0 and while everything works great and I'm very familiar with everything, the IMAP/POP stuff has me stumped. The new release doesn't use the imap-XXX package, for the most part all I saw was the Courier packages for this. So I install them, they start fine, everything appears to work like it should. My only snag is when I try to check e-mail, my client auths with the server just fine, but then it spits back an error of "chdir Maildir failed". After searching around the web for days, I seems to be a common problem across a lot of distros, but no solutions seem to work for mine.

 

Has anyone encountered this before? Am I using the right software for this or is there another package in the Mandriva 2008 library that will work better (without much configuration fuss) ?

 

Thanks everyone!

[adamw]

Have you actually created a directory for Courier to use to store mail, and configured Courier to point to this directory?

 

Courier uses the maildir format for storing mail by default, not mbox. mbox stores an entire account in a single file, maildir stores all messages as single files within a standardized folder structure.

 

For instance, on my mail server, I have a ~/Maildir directory , and this line in /etc/courier/imapd :

 

MAILDIRPATH=Maildir

 

this is the default, so if you don't change this, you need to create a ~/Maildir folder for each user. If you want to use a different folder name, change that parameter and create the appropriate folder.

[ianw1974]

Usually the chdir happens if the directory (as adamw said) doesn't exist, or if it exists, then the directory isn't owned by the user trying to login to the system, or misconfiguration of IMAP and login parameters. Remember that when it needs to look for Maildir the path should finish with / so, Maildir/ will be the line itself. This did my head in because I was missing the trailing slash in my mysql login info for the maildir, eg: /home/ian/.maildir is incorrect, but /home/ian/.maildir/ is correct.

[knightmb]

Have you actually created a directory for Courier to use to store mail, and configured Courier to point to this directory?

 

Courier uses the maildir format for storing mail by default, not mbox. mbox stores an entire account in a single file, maildir stores all messages as single files within a standardized folder structure.

 

For instance, on my mail server, I have a ~/Maildir directory , and this line in /etc/courier/imapd :

 

MAILDIRPATH=Maildir

 

this is the default, so if you don't change this, you need to create a ~/Maildir folder for each user. If you want to use a different folder name, change that parameter and create the appropriate folder.

 

This did solve the error issue. I went into the home account, created the Maildir folder, tried again. Go a different error, that the "cur" directory was missing. So I created that one. That fixed the error issue. It can check mail now. Well, so far so good. But I found out that my postfix setup is using the flat file format for mail delivery. It sends all the e-mails into mbox single file instead of the home directory of the user along with it's counter parts so that Courier is happy when doing a message check.

 

So now that I understand the error, that leads me to my next question. Can I configure Courier to work with the mbox file format that postfix is using or are the two of them just not suppose to be mixed together in this type of configuration?

 

Again, thanks for all the help. I can understand now why Courier wasn't letting me check the mailbox, just need to figure out how to redirect Courier to where the mail really is. :D

[knightmb]

Ok, figured out my issue. I found a link to the "perfect Mandriva 2008.0 server setup"

http://www.howtoforge.com/perfect_server_mandriva_2008.0

and while reading through it, I found where it had the section on Postfix, SSL, and POP3/IMAP server setup. Everything works like a charm now.

 

To update, thanks for everyone's help. It seems I was using the wrong software. If I was going to use the Courier POP/IMAP servers, I should have been using the full blown mail software instead of just one chunk of it like I was doing without knowing any better. It's great to be back with Mandriva 2008.0!!

 

Thanks all!