dovecot failure after update

[William Dudley]

Hi,

Whilst away, my mail server died due to an extended power outage.
After rebooting, everything seems to work OK (i.e. no major filesystem
damage) except that I can no longer connect to my mail server using
thunderbird (on another machine on the same LAN).

The errors in /var/log/sendmail are:

Jul 31 16:58:58 machinenamehere dovecot: imap(userx): Error: User
initialization failed: Namespace '': Mail storage autodetection failed with
home=/home/userx
Jul 31 16:58:58 machinenamehere dovecot: imap: Error: Invalid user
settings. Refer to server log for more information.

I have no idea what server log this refers to, there is no 'dovecot' in
/var/log and no reference
to a log file in /usr/local/etc/dovecot/*

Google searches on this error message don't turn up anything exactly
relevant, and
all results are from 5 years ago on linux, anyway.

uname -a
FreeBSD dudley 10.3-RELEASE-p18 FreeBSD 10.3-RELEASE-p18 #0: Tue Apr 11
10:13:20 UTC 2017
root at amd64-builder.daemonology.net:/usr/obj/usr/src/sys/GENERIC
 i386

pkg info | grep dovecot
dovecot2-2.2.29.1_1            Secure, fast and powerful IMAP and POP3
server

Thanks in advance,
Bill Dudley


This email is free of malware because I run Linux.