Postfix SMTP Auth Error "no SASL authentication mechanisms"

Posted November 3rd, 2007 in Email Servers

I have been setting up a new mail server recently with Postfix and SMTP Auth, and got the error message "no SASL authentication mechanisms".

If you have enabled SMTP Auth with Postfix like this:

smtpd_sasl_auth_enable = yes
smtpd_sasl_security_options = noanonymous
smtpd_sasl_local_domain = $myhostname
broken_sasl_auth_clients = yes
smtpd_recipient_restrictions =
    permit_sasl_authenticated,
    permit_mynetworks,
    reject_unauth_destination

and are getting messages like this (the extract below is from the mail log file):

Nov  2 15:31:09 vps131 postfix/smtpd[14007]: warning: dict_nis_init: NIS domain name not set - NIS lookups disabled
Nov  2 15:31:09 vps131 postfix/smtpd[14007]: warning: xsasl_cyrus_server_get_mechanism_list: no applicable SASL mechanisms
Nov  2 15:31:09 vps131 postfix/smtpd[14007]: fatal: no SASL authentication mechanisms
Nov  2 15:31:10 vps131 postfix/master[12004]: warning: process /usr/libexec/postfix/smtpd pid 14007 exit status 1
Nov  2 15:31:10 vps131 postfix/master[12004]: warning: /usr/libexec/postfix/smtpd: bad command startup -- throttling

then you need to install the cyrus-sasl-plain package like so:

yum install cyrus-sasl-plain

The above method will install the cyrus-sasl-plain packages on CentOS and other RPM/Yum based Linux distributions, so you would need to use the appropriate package manager (and software package) for other Linux distros.

Share or Bookmark

Share or Bookmark this page using the following services. You will need to have an account with the selected service in order to post links or bookmark this page.

Subscribe or Follow

Subscribe via RSS or email, or follow me on Facebook or Twitter below. The RSS icon takes you through to Feedburner where you can select the service or application to use.