i am sure, most of you know, so for all the others which don't know. HOWTO authenticate cyrus-imapd against a simple mysql-database. This works with the default settings from mysqls user root. 1) set MECH=pam in /etc/sysconfig/saslauthd 2) create in /etc/pam.d a file called imap with its contents: auth sufficient /lib/security/pam_mysql.so user=root host=localhost db=imapd table=users usercolumn=benutzer passwdcolumn=password account required /lib/security/pam_mysql.so user=root host=localhost db=imapd table=users usercolumn=benutzer passwdcolumn=password account sufficient /lib/security/pam_unix_acct.so if you use another user than root, change user= to whatever you created. insert passwd=xxx for any password you require for your database. so, this is part 1...now, with this settings, you should create within a database called imapd with the table users and their columns benutzer (means username, just has to be what you set in your /etc/pam.d/imap) and password (the passwdcolumn-entry from /etc/pam.d/imap). Do this with phpmyadmin or in the shell: mysql create database imapd; create table users (idx int(6) primary key auto_increment,benutzer varchar(10),password varchar(10)); for your users to insert, use also phpmyadmin or do in the shell mysql use imapd; insert into users values ('','username','password'); you're finished....this is a basic mysql-authentication that works for me. just keep in mind: - you're here using the mysql-root account - your passwords are stored as plaintext, use crypt=1 in /etc/pam.d/imap if you want have them encrypted in your database - this just serves imap-services. if you plan to use also pop, imaps, pop3s and smtp-auth you should copy /etc/pam.d/imap to: /etc/pam.d.... pop,imaps,pop3s,smtp this could not be without error, but it works on my fresh installation of fc2. However, do not forget to create your mailboxes in cyradm :-) HTH Roger