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I am attempting to login to my IMAP Dovecot server on my Amazon EC2 instance. I am attempting to login as root and I recieve this error in the mail log:

dovecot: imap: Error: user root: Invalid settings in userdb: userdb returned 0 as uid

What should I do? Thanks.

womble
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john
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2 Answers2

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Don't login to IMAP as root ($10 says you're not using TLS either, so your root password just went across the Internet en-clair). Redirect mail destined for the root account to a non-privileged account, collect the mail from that account, change your root password, and setup TLS.

womble
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  • I figured using root for login would not be a good idea. I am trying to setup the mail handling for the user "postmaster" now which I assume is the default account postfix creates. Have no idea how to setup TLS. – john Jul 19 '11 at 00:53
  • I can't get postfix to receive mail as a different user other than "root". In the alias file I changed the email alias to "postmaster". I reloading postfix but it still continues to use root@mydomain.com instead of postmaster@mydomain.com – john Jul 19 '11 at 01:12
  • If you don't know how to do something like setup TLS, ask a question on Server Fault. Did you run `newaliases` after you edited `/etc/aliases`? Also, `postmaster` is a "role account" too; you should feed that to a real user account as well. – womble Jul 19 '11 at 01:17
  • Yes I ran newaliases. Should I not use postmaster and make another account? I don't know why it keeps sending to root – john Jul 19 '11 at 01:20
  • You should already have a regular account on the system for you to use; redirect all the mail to that. Please don't ask extended questions in comments; reformulate your question into something comprehensive and answerable and ask it as a new question. – womble Jul 19 '11 at 01:21
  • But if I do that you may not find my question. – john Jul 19 '11 at 01:22
  • You'll have to take that chance, because I'm not answering any more in this comment stream. You'll get more attention for your questions if you upvote useful answers now and then, though. – womble Jul 19 '11 at 01:23
  • Very theoretical answer, what are the steps to fix? Which files to touch? How to set up redirect etc? It's one of the top Google finds but doesn't say much in detail... yeah, you can google even more but... – IceFire Jul 25 '23 at 07:36
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I had this issue today. It occurred when I added more than one domain to the server. So, I followed this help: https://www.howtoforge.com/community/threads/postfix-dovecot-not-working-configuration-problem.63364/#post-303250 and referenced to the ispconfig manual at page 193. After that I update all email accounts and it's working!

Hope it helps.

Dat TT
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    Welcome to Server Fault! Whilst this may theoretically answer the question, [it would be preferable](//meta.stackoverflow.com/q/8259) to include the essential parts of the answer here, and provide the link for reference. – Frederik Dec 21 '15 at 09:40