Cyrus Imap plaintext authentication with saslauth & PAM

Fri Apr 24 03:42:37 EDT 2009

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> <font size="-1"><font face="Arial">Hello everyone!<br>
> <br>
> I'm new to this mailing list, actually, this is the first mailing list
> I've ever subscribed. :) So greetings to all from Hungary! (And excuse
> my really bad english, please)<br>

Hi,

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> <br>
> I'm not sure if I can ask for help here, but I didn't find any answer
> elsewhere, so trying this out.<br>
> <br>
> I have a postfix relay server and a (local) cyrus imap server on the
> same machine. Everything was fine until I thought, I change the imap
> authentication from sasldb to saslauth, to have global authentication
> on postfix and cyrus.<br>
> Postfix uses saslauthd, which is configured for PAM. It works
> perfectly, with plain/login/cram/digest mechanisms, with or without
> tls/ssl, absolutely no problems with it. Saslauth tests are all fine
> obviously.<br>
> So I decided to use this with cyrus imap too. Set it to use the same
> saslauth daemon, and plain, login, cram-md5 and digest-md5 mechs.<br>
> Since then, I can not login with plain or login mechs, because they
> aren't being offered at all by cyrus imapd. I can login with cram or
> digest fine.<br>
> I understand that plain login isn't offered by default, only after a
> successfull tls session setup, but if I understand correctly, the
> "allowplaintext: yes" option should still force imapd to offer plain
> logins. But it doesn't. I tried it with different sasl_min|max_levels,
> to no avail.<br>

"allowplaintext: 1" should indeed enable plain. At least that works well
for me. I expect you are using the packages from a distribution, maybe
they have added some kind of "security" patches to make things more safe?
Could you try with the following line in your cyrus config:

sasl_mech_list: PLAIN

Regards,
Simon