I am trying to setup postfix, courier-imap and mariadb for a local mail server for a purchased domain. machin is archlinux. so far, I have 1 user account set up for the mail. I am able to send out messages from this account by telnetting into localhost port 25. As well, postfix is listening on port 25 for incoming emails, and any email address on the internet is able to send mail to this server & it will accept them properly. However, I am now trying to login to the server via imap. I am trying currently by telnetting to localhost port 143. The connection attempt is made succesfully, but when I try to do no matter what I try, I always get "NO Login failed."

I can assure you 100% I am typing the name & password correctly. One thing - this password contains 3 special characters, namely a semicolon, ampersand, and exclamation point. Could this be the cause of the problem? Maybe courier-imap can't handle special characters in passwords? If not, then what might be the problem?

Here is a link to a page about how to debug authentication problems with courier-imap. Maybe the logged output from your system will shed some light on the problem.

yeah thanks, got it working. hadn't started "rpcbind". now to figure out how to enable SSL *yay*