I've been running popa3d on Red Hat EL for almost a year.  One morning, I extract my emails from the server (running PostFix) and everything's fine.  Then, later in the day, I get an error (T-bird says a password error) and can't get to anything.  Nothing else has happened on that server, its running shared files via samba and that's all.

I can log onto the machine with the email IDs and passwords, so the operating system accepts these accounts as valid.

NMAP shows port 110 is open.

I can do 'telnet linux2600 110' and it responds +OK.  USER command elicits +OK also, but PASS fails: it just says '-ERR' and dumps me back to the command line, says "connection closed by foreign host."

When I look in the log, I see the following (for this example I had just gone to the console and stopped and started popa3d just to be sure):

Jul 12 16:44:55 linux2600 popa3d: popa3d startup succeeded
Jul 12 16:47:44 linux2600 popa3d[3369]: Session from 192.168.10.100
Jul 12 16:47:44 linux2600 popa3d[3369]: Authentication passed for jrm
Jul 12 16:47:44 linux2600 popa3d[3369]: Failed or refused to load /var/spool/mail/jrm

This makes me think there's something corrupted in the mail files, but the fact that it won't accept a password (for my account or any other) makes me think its authentication.

I completely rebooted the server, no change in behavior.

These mailboxes ARE accepting mail, so PostFix can access the mailboxes.

Thanks in advance . . .