IMAP Authentication against user's mailbox

[vpetersson]

Hi,

First, let me say that I'm rather novice when it comes to Zimbra, but I hope you guys can help me out.

I'm looking for a way to authenticate against Zimbra users via the admin account (IMAP). I found this thread that suggest that the login-string would be something like:

. LOGIN user*admin adminpassword

However, the user clearly states that it didn't work, hence this post.

I've search the forum and the web for some time, but I can't find any clear answers and/or official documentation on this.

I'm also curious if this feature is enabled by default.

[vpetersson]

Ok, I configured a Zimbra instance (zcs-7.1.3) to test this and I can confirm that authenticating this way does not work. Since imapsync apparently support this method of authentication, I'm curious if anyone know how this actually works.

[ppearl]

Zimbra supports SASL AUTH=PLAIN. You should be able to authenticate as a target user using only an admin username/password and the target username -- no user passwords are referenced in this case. You may find that you need to use SSL by default too.

For example, imapsync takes advantage of this capability via --authuser1/--authuser2 arguments.

Some references:
imap admin access
how can I use imapsync with admin access and no users passwords
Talk:User Migration - Zimbra :: Wiki