When I ran the weekly update on my server today, rebooting the system to ensure all running processes are using the latest version of all files, courier-imap failed to launch. No error message, nothing in the logs.
Thankfully, only four packages had been updated and knowing what to google for, I quickly discovered this bug report on gentoo’s bugzilla: Bug 98745 - courier-{imap,authlib} init scripts fail to work with baselayout-1.12.*
Basically, it seems as if the current baselayout package changes something in the way daemons are run, breaking the courier-imap init scripts which are badly written as it seems. The init scripts for the same daemons in the full courier package have been reported to be still working. So either switch to the full courier suite or replace your courier init scripts with the ones that have been attached to the bug above.
What actually shocks me is the bug’s age. It has been reported more than a year ago and today, it made its way into the gentoo stable branch. That’ll be a whole lot of fun for all those people installing courier-imap for the first time. How many days would you spend trying to get your configuration fixed until you finally consider the package itself is broken?
Update: The courier-imap package has been updated and includes working init scripts, so everything is back to normal now 
August 16th, 2006 at 11:15 am
Wow, that is horrible! I’ll try and keep this one in mind, thanks.
September 30th, 2006 at 7:18 am
The old scripts had actually been installed for me for some time before this bit me. I regularly emerge sync and world, but rarely reboot, so I never ran into the problem after a power outage. A few things were a little out of whack, but they were all easily fixed. This one had ne vexed until I stumbled upon this post.
Thanks!