Knowledge Base

Unable to receive email: the recipient email account has an empty password in the Plesk database

Symptoms

Unable to receive an email on a Plesk server for the [email protected] mailbox with the following errors in /var/log/maillog file:

dovecot_authdb_plesk[1377]: No such user '[email protected]' in mail authorization database
dovecot: auth: plesk([email protected]): Mail account information for user='[email protected]' was not found
dovecot: auth: Debug: userdb out: NOTFOUND#0111
dovecot: service=lda, [email protected], ip=[]. Debug: auth input:
postfix/pipe[14513]: E141A88AA5: to=<[email protected], relay=plesk_virtual, delay=2, delays=2/0/0/0.06, dsn=4.2.1, status=deferred (Message can not be delivered at this time )

The same errors appear for the messages that are forwarded internally after switching from Courier to Dovecot.

Cause

The recipient email account has an empty password in the Plesk database.

Resolution

For a single email account

Log into Plesk.
Go to Domains > example.com > Email Addresses > [email protected].
Set a new password into Password and Confirm password fields and press the OK button:

For all affected email accounts

Log into the server via SSH.
Create a backup for psa database:

# plesk db dump psa > /root/psa.sql
Execute the command below to create a /root/affectedaccounts.txt file that contains all email accounts with the empty passwords:

# MYSQL_PWD=`cat /etc/psa/.psa.shadow` mysql -uadmin psa -Ne “select concat(m.mail_name,’@’,d.name) as mailbox from domains d, mail m, accounts a where m.dom_id=d.id and m.account_id=a.id and m.postbox=’true’ and a.password =”” > /root/affectedaccounts.txt
Run the following command to set a new password for the email accounts from /root/affectedaccounts.txt file:

# while read i; do /usr/local/psa/bin/mail -u $i -passwd “NEWPASSWORD”; done < /root/affectedaccounts.txt

Note: in the command above replace NEWPASSWORD with the desired password that will be set for all affected email accounts from the /root/affectedaccounts.txt file.