hi, i am relatively new to Linux (have used a few lives OS's before). Now I have my new laptop running on Ubuntu 12.04 lts. Not being a newcomer to computers i am getting on with this fine.
My problem is with a vps that i am currently trying to configure an email server on (Debian squeeze). I followed this guide to create the mail server and each stage appeared to be successful. That is until i tried to logon to sqirrelmail through my browser. I got this message: ERROR: Connection dropped by IMAP server.. My husband told me to telnet the smtp port as when he tried to create an email server with a similar configuration it would not show. so i did and i did get the correct response.

I have seen many forum posts many places over the internet where this same problem has occured. All solutions given have varied depending on the distro being used. So i figured my best option was to post myself and ask.

Can anyone help me?

Hi,

first you should find out if your server is running IMAP support (port 143) which you can test with
if it responds then it's probably ok (the closest best solution)
and you need to check the config of squirrelmail (not the easy task ...).
Try send a message (email) to that m-box which you are trying to log in, if there is no messages yet in the mailbox, then it also could give this error (dropped...)

You could also use Roundcube webmail which works great with Dovecot, instead of Squirrelmail.

good luck

1 members found this post helpful.

Thank you for you reply. It was useful in resolving my issues.
First of all I had already tried Checking the imap post via telnet and found that i had a response before recieving your reply. I found some examples of the squirrelmail config and all seemed to be in order. I sent myself mail as you suggested and this also did not resolve my issue with squirrelmail, I still got the same Error: Connection dropped by imap server.

Next I looked through the 'mail.log' and found that my problem was this error Fatal: Namespace Initialization failed. So I looked through the config files for Postfix and Dovecot. I found that they were both looking for the mail in different locations. My mail is stored at '/home/user/mbox'. In the dovecot config file (/etc/dovecot/dovecot.conf) I found and uncommented the line 'mail_location'and edited as follows 'mail_location = /home/%u/mbox'.

My issues are now resolved and Squirrelmail is functioning correctly.

That's excellent

sometimes it happens that one just needs a "slight push" in the right direction to see the solution and solves it (like you did) !