Postfix/Dovecot - warning: SASL: Connect to private/auth failed: No such file or directory

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Submitted by falko (Contact Author) (Forums) on Wed, 2011-08-24 09:31. :: Errors

Error: Postfix/Dovecot - warning: SASL: Connect to private/auth failed: No such file or directory

You have the following error messages in your mail log:

Aug 23 15:55:01 server1 postfix/smtpd[15194]: warning: SASL: Connect to private/auth failed: No such file or directory
Aug 23 15:55:01 server1 postfix/smtpd[15194]: fatal: no SASL authentication mechanisms
Aug 23 15:55:02 server1 postfix/master[3979]: warning: process /usr/libexec/postfix/smtpd pid 15194 exit status 1
Aug 23 15:55:02 server1 postfix/master[3979]: warning: /usr/libexec/postfix/smtpd: bad command startup -- throttling

Solution

Open your dovecot.conf (/etc/dovecot.conf or /etc/dovecot/dovecot.conf, depending on your distribution) and make sure you have the following lines in it:

[...]
client {
       path = /var/spool/postfix/private/auth
       mode = 0660
       user = postfix
       group = postfix
}
[...]

Restart Dovecot.

Then check if /var/spool/postfix/private/auth got created:

ls -l /var/spool/postfix/private/auth

Also make sure you have

[...]
queue_directory = /var/spool/postfix
[...]

in /etc/postfix/main.cf. If not, add it and restart Postfix.

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Thanks, that helps a lot

Submitted by Henry Motu (not registered) on Mon, 2012-12-10 21:42.

Thanks, that helps a lot

My server - Debian Squeeze (Debian 6.0) With BIND, Dovecot & Nginx

The following line was absent in my Postfix configuration file:

queue_directory = /var/spool/postfix

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Dosen't work

Submitted by Konrad (not registered) on Tue, 2012-09-11 13:12.

dovecot[9075]: doveconf: Fatal: Error in configuration file /etc/dovecot/dovecot.conf line 101: Unknown setting: client

Dosen't work. It should be in 10-master.conf this line. But I don't know why it dosen't work after all

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Re: Dosen't work

Submitted by Jeff Green (not registered) on Thu, 2012-11-22 10:25.

Yea, good ole Dovecot like messing things around to screw people up. Really kills productivity when the do this, and with millions of bytes of advice all refering to old versions you'll never find the answer on Google

The guy who thought it would be blast to change this needs stabbing in the eyes with a pencil!

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Re: Re: Dosen't work

Submitted by easyorange (not registered) on Sun, 2013-01-20 15:54.

I had exactly the same problem and the instructions on this page did not help at all. In fact, the instructions on postfix site did not help either.

On our system, here's what helped -

chown postfix:postfix /var/spool/postfix/private/auth

chmod 666 /var/spool/postfix/private/auth

And, in /etc/dovecot/conf.d/10-master.conf (or /usr/local/etc/dovecot/conf.d/10-master.conf) set the config like this -

unix_listener auth-userdb {

mode = 0666

user = postfix