I am very weary of following the provided howto's. I've recompiled cyrus-sasl and cyrus-imap at least 20 times. They install fine.
I am using inetd for the pop and imap services.
Then running a netsat command shows listening on 110 and 143. Every time I try the 'imtest' I get the following output :

'failure: prot layer failure'

Syslog won't tell me much other than this :
'Jun 5 10:04:11 jac3 imapd: could not getenv(CYRUS_SERVICE); exiting'

Whatever that environment variable is, I have no idea.

Here is my config for cyrus-sasl:
./configure --enable-anon --enable-plain --enable-login

Config for cyrus-imap:
./configure --with-bdb-incdir=/usr/include/db4 --disable-sieve --with-auth=unix

My Slackware-current mail server is running:
postfix with uucp
cyrus-imap
cyrus-sasl
procmail
squirrelmail on apache1

I use the linuxpackages builds of the first two and cyrus-sasl from Slackware

Thanks!, I'll give that setup a go. At least I know some one has done it.

linuxpackages does not seem to have a cyrus-imap package, only a cyrus-sasl package.

Cyrus-sasl is part of official slackware, at least since 10.2.

I am running a Slackware 10.0 server with cyrus-sasl and cyrus-imap, and for the mail transport I use sendmail with amavisd-new plugged into it, providing virus- and spam scanning using clamav and spamassassin.
This has been running for a few years now, and with no problems at all.
I do have a cyrus-imap SlackBuild that I never published, but I can have a look at it and polish it for general use. Setting up Cyrus on Slackware should not be that difficult - setting up Sendmail with a proper virus/spam scanning is harder.

I configured my cyrus-sasl like this:
but you might also want to look at the Slackware 10.2 SlackBuild file.

My cyrus-imap was basically configured using
Note, that it is a good thing to have Sieve. Sieve is a powerful server-side filtering language (meaning you can setup filters on the server and don't have to depend on mail client filters like you can define in Thinderbird) and you can use it for vacation messages and auto-forwarding too.

Could you post your /etc/imapd.conf and /etc/cyrus.conf perhaps?
And how exactly do you start saslauthd?

Hope this helps.

Eric

Whoops, posting when half asleep from the wrong machine problem again
My mail system is not running cyrus-imap but courier-imap

Why not use courier anyway, it is a very solid imap and pop server with support for maildirs instead of mbox stores.

Because Cyrus-IMAPd scales well, is secure, fast, and is favored in the larger (aka commercial) distributions and groupware server setups as the IMAP server of choice. It does not use mbox files, has quota support and does not require a local Linux user account for every inbox that you create (so you can set it up as a IMAP black box server in your network if you want).

Overall, I am very happy with Cyrus IMAP. Of course, for a small network with one or two users it might have too much functionality. But it does not put a high load on your server anyway.

Eric

Many thanks Alien Bob! I'm going to take your advice and try again. One thing to note is the fact that when I install cyrus-imap I do not get the /etc/cyrus.conf file. It sounds like it is needed for proper operation of the 'master' process. I also neglected to even think about saslauthd.

davidsrsb, I already do have courier running on our server, along with Open-Xchange. I see that the OX team always uses cyrus for IMAP, and I believe that there are good reasons as to why. Not to mention the reasons stated by Alien Bob. But I do appreciate your help.

Back to the original post
From the cyrus-imap faq
quote
Q: I'm getting a message about "imapd: could not getenv(CYRUS_SERVICE); exiting" in my imapd.log. What's wrong?

A: Remove all imap, pop, lmtp and sieve lines from [x]inetd.conf and restart [x]inetd. Cyrus is run out of its own "master" process.
/quote
Slackware has pop3d and imapd by default which need to be removed.

You guys have led me to at least the point I am at. Before, I could not get 'master' to run. It was the missing '/etc/cyrus.conf' file that halted the whole works.
Now the daemon stays running, it is listening on 143, and I can get a login screen when I run 'imtest'. Now to iron out authentication.

Now I can authenticate. This was the trick :
saslpasswd <user_name> -f /etc/sasldb2

I did of course create the file '/etc/sasldb2' before running that command.

Just my opinion, but I believe that a whole lot of trouble can be avoided by having these files created during install. It would have saved me hours. And a crucial tip was provided by Alien Bob when he mentioned the need to start the process 'saslauthd'. That was not mentioned at all in the Cyrus howto's. The '/etc/cyrus.conf' file was also not mentioned in any howto's. That seems very strange to me.

davidsrsb also provided a crucial tip. Cyrus is indeed not supposed to run through inetd anymore. The Cyrus 'master' process runs the show.

Now off to setting up mailboxes. I'm almost at the finish line.

If you want to use your existing Linux user accounts for authentication instead of duplicating your passwords into /etc/sasldb2, you could try and start saslauthd on boot (from rc.local for instance) like this:
Eric

Once again, thanks. Mission accomplished. I am now recieving mail in the IMAP mailbox.

That is a good idea Alien Bob(adding entry to rc.local), however Patrick V was nice enough to create '/etc/rc.d/rc.saslauthd' in the prebuilt Slackware cyrus-sasl package.