sieve problem

[synrat]

freebsd 5.3, cyrus installed from ports with default options.

cyrus-imapd-2.2.12_1
cyrus-sasl-2.1.21
cyrus-sasl-saslauthd-2.1.21

all imap related stuff seems to work just fine, but sieve filters
don't seem to work.
I can create and upload sieve filters to /var/imap/sieve/
via avelsieve-1.9.3 plugin for squirrlmail, but they just don't seem
to have any effect at all. When trying to troubleshoot with sieveshell,
I get authentication errors

sivtest -u cyrus -a cyrus -w mypass localhost
S: "IMPLEMENTATION" "Cyrus timsieved v2.2.12"
S: "SASL" "PLAIN"
S: "SIEVE" "fileinto reject envelope vacation imapflags notify 
subaddress relational comparator-i;ascii-numeric regex"
S: OK
C: AUTHENTICATE "PLAIN" {28+}
Y3lydXAMY3lydXAMWYxpc2ExWw==
S: NO "Authentication Error"
Authentication failed. generic failure
Security strength factor: 0
^CC: LOGOUT
Connection closed.


if I test the credentials, then it works ok.

sudo testsaslauthd -u cyrus -p mypass -s sieve localhostost
0: OK "Success."

debug level log only gives me this

Sep 29 14:13:17 skywalker master[40859]: about to exec 
/usr/local/cyrus/bin/timsieved
Sep 29 14:13:17 skywalker sieve[40859]: executed
Sep 29 14:13:17 skywalker sieve[40859]: accepted connection
Sep 29 14:13:18 skywalker master[876]: process 40859 exited, status 0

any clues how to troubleshoot this ?

thank you