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Users are not able to log into mailboxes: Invalid or unsupported Unicode character or escape sequence found in string

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Vladimir Chernikov
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Plesk for Linux kb: bug ABT: Group A

Applicable to:

  • Plesk for Linux

Symptoms

  • Users are not able to log into mailboxes and the following records can be found in the file /var/log/maillog:    

    CONFIG_TEXT: plesk courier-imaps: LOGIN FAILED, user=john.doe@example.com, ip=[::ffff:203.0.113.2]

    CONFIG_TEXT: dovecot_authdb_plesk[9898]: No such user 'john.doe@example.com' in mail authorization database 

  • A domain does not exist in the output of the command /usr/local/psa/admin/sbin/mail_auth_view (or the output is empty at all without grep):     

    # /usr/local/psa/admin/sbin/mail_auth_view | grep example.com
    # (empty output)

  • Manual execution of the utility mail_auth_dump ( /usr/lib64/plesk-9.0/remote_mail_restore/mail_auth_dump on RHEL-based operating systems, /usr/lib/plesk-9.0/remote_mail_restore/mail_auth_dump on Debian and Ubuntu) with the Plesk debug logging enabled fails with the following error:

    # /usr/lib/plesk-9.0/remote_mail_restore/mail_auth_dump
    ..........
    DEBUG [util_exec] [07d041579abfc778c97734f8eb0d4318-0] Finished in 0.0293s, Error code: 1, stdout: , stderr: /opt/psa/admin/bin/mail_auth_dump.worker[18105]: Input parse error: Invalid or unsupported Unicode character or escape sequence found in string. UTF8 encoded characters and '\u' escape sequences are not supported. Error occured at offset 51062, character '\'.
    ERR [util_exec] proc_close() failed ['/opt/psa/admin/bin/mail_auth_dump.worker' '--start' '--finish'] with exit code [1]

Cause

The password of one of the mail accounts contains unsupported symbols like ä, ö, ü, symbols like "♥", or random sequences with leading "\u".

This repair tool behavior is confirmed as Plesk bug with ID PPPM-10902, which is planned to be fixed in future Plesk updates.

Resolution

  1. Enable Plesk debug logging (without enabling show.sql_query).

  2. Connect to the server via SSH

  3. Execute the utility mail_auth_dump :

    RPM-based systems (CentOS, RHEL):

    # /usr/lib64/plesk-9.0/remote_mail_restore/mail_auth_dump

    APT-based (Debian, Ubuntu)

    # /usr/lib/plesk-9.0/remote_mail_restore/mail_auth_dump

  4. In the output find the passwords with \u sequence.

  5. Log in to Plesk

  6. Go to Domains > example.com > Email addresses and change the password for the found mail accounts.

  7. Execute the command to repair mail authorization database:

    # /usr/local/psa/admin/sbin/mchk --with-spam

Comments

2 comments

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  • Avatar
    Mehmet Emin Aydın

    Is this command ( /usr/local/psa/admin/sbin/mail_auth_view ) has short code like "plesk repair all".

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  • Avatar
    Ivan Postnikov

    Hello Mehmet Emin Aydın

    That's the only way to execute such command.

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