cannot connect to saslauthd

I recently ran some updates on my FreeBSD server and ran into a problem that resulted in the following error in /var/log/maillog

warning: SASL authentication failure: cannot connect to saslauthd server: No such file or directory

The update process tends to kill saslauthd which will generally restart itself properly on reboot, but if you’re in the middle of a long rebuild and need to restore mail service quickly some or all of the following may help:

/etc/rc.d/inetd restart
/usr/local/libexec/courier-imap/imapd-ssl.rc stop
/usr/local/libexec/courier-imap/imapd-ssl.rc start
/usr/local/etc/rc.d/saslauthd stop
/usr/local/etc/rc.d/saslauthd start

In the years since, I’ve moved to Dovecot.