Wheezy Mutt and IMAPS SASL problem🔗

For six or more months, I had a real problem with my mutt configuration. One day, under my main homebox which runs Debian Wheezy, mutt failed to open a session on my IMAPS (dovecot) server, claiming "Error allocating SASL connection" ("Erreur lors de l'allocation de la connexion SASL" in french). I managed to repair it by freezing mutt, libsasl2-2, libsasl2-modules and promise to myself to report a bug on the BTS. On my EeePC (under Debian Squeeze), everything was fine !

Now that Wheezy has been frozen, I made a great update and grabbed the wheezy versions of mutt and the libsasl packets. And of course, mutt start to fail ! I finally found bug #664249 which pointed me to a workaround…

I just have changed my /etc/hosts file to include a "static" FQDN for my homebox in order to make mutt work again. Since then, everything is fine. You only see this bug if you use mutt (which reduces the number of users ;-) against a IMAPS server (which also decreases the number of users) on Debian Wheezy without a fully qualified domain name for the client computer. The solution to this bug is far from easy to find…

I hope it will be useful to somebody and that's why I wrote about it.