Yeah, no, the search results weren't much use. Mozilla has a page at http://kb.mozillazine.org/Password_rejected , but it largely deals with specific rather than generic situations and typical issues such as incorrect entry (typos).

There were some result in a search for the error in this forum, but none seemed in any way related.

Craig

I ended up rebooting the server and that fixed the problem. I suspect that one service or another was not running. However, there were about a hundred "dovecot/pop3-login" processes running just before I rebooted, so I'm at a loss to explain what happened after the reboot -- i.e., what was running after the reboot that wasn't running before it.

I can say that there's not much information in /var/log/dovecot.log, as it seems that unsuccessful connection attempts were not logged ... which, I suppose, make sense.

Something similar happened last week, but I was in the middle of doing updates when the reports started coming in. Once I was done the updates the problem went away, so evidently one service or another was (re)started and the problem went away. So I suspect this problem will re-occur unless I find out the cause and fix it.

If anyone has any ideas, I'd love to hear them. Thanks.

Craig

Hi Zhang,

Thanks for your reply.

The only process_limit set in /etc/dovecot/dovecot.conf is inside the "service imap-login" braces and it's set to 500. There is no process_limit set for POP3, which leads me to believe it will be set to the default. The default_process_limit directive is commented out though.

Is Dovecot hard-coded to set the (default_)process_limit to 100 if it's not defined in "dovecot.conf"? If that's the case, that's probably where I'm running into the problem, as it's POP I'm having the problems with (no issues with IMAP) and at the time it happened there were about 100 POP processes running.

That said, I did not see any "process_limit" error messages in /var/log/maillog.

Thanks.

Craig

(Edited to make a little clearer and add the fact that I saw no error messages in the log that seemed related to the "process_limit" directive.)

Which log are you looking for?

I already stated that there were no "process_limit" errors in /var/log/maillog.

It may be my job to paste useful log information here, but I'm paying a licence fee to get some reasonable help in a public forum. So how about suggesting which log I should look in for the inormation that you would find useful to help me?

Thank-you.

Hi Zhang,

Can we start from the beginning here and get past the misunderstandings?

Based on my research and your feedback so far, I think that I am possibly running into a limit on the number of "dovecot/pop3-login" processes. It's a guess -- because I can't see any other reason based on my analysis of /var/log/maillog and /var/log/dovecot.log, so I have nothing to show you -- but I think it's a reasonable one based on the symptoms, and one on which I am willing to rely unless or until I find otherwise.

So then I did some more research, some of it in the Dovecot documentation to which you linked. To make a long story short, I'm looking for clarification of a Dovecot configuration parameter as explained in message 7 above. I am NOT looking for interpretation of log entries.

So, in iRedMail's implementation of Dovecot, is the default "process_limit" for POP3 set to 100, or is it set to something else? It's a very straightforward question, the answer to which is a "yes" or a "no", and if the answer is "no" the answer should include a number. Log output is not needed to come up with an answer.

Based on your answer I will either increase the "process_limit" for POP3 processes, or I will keep investigating.

Can you please answer my question? Thank-you.

Craig

Hi Zhang,

Thanks very much. I increased the "process_limit" for POP to 500.

But when restarting Dovecot, I got this that I do not believe was present before:

[06:25:49 root@host dovecot]# service dovecot restart
Stopping Dovecot Imap:                                     [  OK  ]
Starting Dovecot Imap: doveconf: Warning: service auth { client_limit=1000 } is lower than required under max. load (1100)
doveconf: Warning: service anvil { client_limit=1000 } is lower than required under max. load (1103)
Warning: service auth { client_limit=1000 } is lower than required under max. load (1100)
Warning: service anvil { client_limit=1000 } is lower than required under max. load (1103)
                                                           [  OK  ]
[06:26:10 root@host dovecot]#

It also shows up when I execute "doveconf -n". But there is no existing "client_limit" variable defined in dovecot.conf, and Dovecot seems to be working fine.

They're only warnings, but I guessed that they cropped up because of the increased process_limit for POP3 combined with other process_limits. So I resolved them by lowering the "process_limit" for POP3 to 390.

Thanks again.

Craig