On 2008-04-19 at 13:41 +0200, M. Sabath wrote:
> I use Dovecot and exim4 on a private debian 4 System in our office.
> Twice a day I sent email to my normal account with a system summary.
>
> After the last update it doesn't work anymore.
> The local Mail within the office works fine.
>
> in /var/log/exim4/mainlog it always says:
>
> 2008-04-19 12:07:34 1JijL2-0000zn-Co == markus@???
> R=smarthost T=remote_smtp_smarthost defer (0): bad base 64
> string in challenge: CRAM-MD5
>
> what is wrong?
You system sent "AUTH CRAM-MD5" to begin authentication and expected to
see back a line something like:
334 PDYzMjIuMTIwODY4MDM2NkBzbXRwLnNwb2RodWlzLm9yZz4=
where the random stuff is in Base64.
What your system got back started with a "3", so was an authentication
continuation, but the data was not valid base64. So the problem is
probably with the remote server.
Find such a mail in the queue (it's still there, deferred), and take the
Exim message-id (looking something like 012345-6789ab-00) and run:
exim -d+auth -M $msgid 2>&1 | tee trace.log
Look at trace.log and see what was sent back from the server. If it's
not obvious what's wrong, consider posting the relevant part of the
exchange and asking for more help. CRAM-MD5 *should* be safe to post
without leading to revealing passwords, especially since you're not
actually getting that far.
-Phil
