I tried all of the suggestions posted in this thread but the following is what actually worked.
We viewed the contents of /opt/zimbra/conf/ldap-vad.cf and found the password stored therein. Then we used an ldap browser/editor to set the password for zmamavisd and zmpostfix to the value that was in the file - NOT to what was in zmlocalconfig. Now it is connecting again and has returned me to my original problem which i will post in a separate thread so as not to hijack this one.
So the question that remains is - why wasn't :
Code:
zmlocalconfig -e ldap_postfix_password=password
or
zmldappasswd -p password
updating the passwords in the /opt/zimbra/conf/ldap* files?