Our mail server died today. Fortunately,I had previously copied over all
mail, passwd, and homes over to an existing fedora core 3 server. As far
as I know I have set up permissions properly and everything should be good
to go. The server receives mail just fine. I can access the users mail box
via webmin and see the stored messages. I can telnet to ports 25, 110, and
143, and when testing Outlook account settings everything completes
successfully. However, when a user attempts to retrieve mail via pop3 they
get the following error on their end:

Task 'mail.domain.name - Receiving' reported error (0x800CCC13) : 'Unable
to connect to the network.  Check your network connection or modem.  The
server responded: -ERR Authentication failed.'

I get the following corresponding error in the servers mail log:


 filesSep 26 10:13:57 jaguar5 pop3(sglieden): File isn't in mbox format:
/var/mail/sglieden
 Sep 26 10:13:57 jaguar5 pop3(sglieden): File isn't in mbox format:
/var/mail/sglieden
 Sep 26 10:13:57 jaguar5 pop3(sglieden): Couldn't open INBOX: Internal
error occured. Refer to server log for more information


I have found one way to fix things is to delete the user mailbox, touch
it, and run a short shell script against it to set permissions. This all
would go much quicker if there were a way to copy existing messages to a
holding spot and append them to the newley created mailbox. Is there an
easy way to do this? Better yet, is there a way of fixing the original
problem without deleting mail boxes?