Kudos on the setup with postfix and sasl/pam. Very clean. I've got a couple of suggestions/comments based on my experience with this.

If you're like me and want to script everything, you can replace the last few steps that are done with an editor with these sed scripts:

sed -i 's/# START=yes/START=yes\nPARAMS="-m \/var\/spool\/postfix\/var\/run\/saslauthd"/g' /etc/default/saslauthd
sed -i 's/dir=/# dir=/g' /etc/init.d/saslauthd
sed -i 's/PWDIR=\/var\/run\/saslauthd/PWDIR=\/var\/spool\/postfix\/var\/run\/saslauthd/g' /etc/init.d/saslauthd
sed -i 's/PIDFILE="\/var\/run\/${NAME}\/saslauthd.pid"/PIDFILE="${PWDIR}\/saslauthd.pid"\ndir="root sasl 755 ${PWDIR}"/g' /etc/init.d/saslauthd

I'm not totally sure about the wisdom of changing a script in /etc/init.d, but it works for now. :-)


I used this setup to convert from an RPM-based distro (Mandriva) to Ubuntu. In the process, we had to figure out how to switch from UW-IMAP to Courier. There are some great tools to help. I recommend mb2md.pl. It's actively maintained, easy to use, and works great. We converted several mailboxes without any problems.

One other note: In the process of conversion, I couldn't tell for sure if everything was working ok because I was getting a "could not open mailbox" error back from my mail client. You can test the pieces quite easily to find errors. To test SASL, do the following:

testsaslauthd -u username -p password -f /var/spool/postfix/var/run/saslauthd/mux

If SASL is working ok, then you can telnet into postfix to verify it. Look at this page under the "testing" section. If you don't have mimencode, try this:

perl -MMIME::Base64 -e 'print encode_base64("username_or_password");'

Thanks so much for a great piece of work on this setup page.