Fixing Cyrus SASL(-13): authentication failure: checkpass failed error
October 7th, 2009
The last few days I keep having trouble connecting to my imap server running Cyrus. I started to view my syslog when trying to authenticate to the Cyrus server, there was one line interesting:
Cyrus SASL(-13): authentication failure: checkpass failed error
I thought it should have something to do with the passwords so I tried to enter the Cyrus server with:
# cyradm localhost
When I entered my password I could not connect. This was weird since I was 100% sure about the correctness. To be sure I resetted all my imap box passwords using:
# saslpasswd2 username
This didn’t fix it either. Then I read on a website about the saslauthd daemon not running. I restarted the service and everything worked as normal 
My guess is that an Ubuntu update stopped the saslauthd daemon but did not restart it.