IMAP login to disabled accounts

Andrew Daviel <[email protected]> Fri, 4 Mar 2011 14:56:55 -0800 (PST)
Newsgroups gmane.mail.imap.uw.c-client
Message-ID <[email protected]>
We just had some spam sent via our webmail. Turns out we had an account 
with a blank password but the shell set to /sbin/nologin (RedHat Linux). 
The webmail client was able to login with random passwords.
This seems to be true logging in with Alpine also - random passwords 
work, but blank ones do not.

I suspect that this is standard Linux behaviour and stupidity on our 
part. However, the ability to login with random passwords that are not 
checked is a bit bizarre.