I changed the MECHANISMS from pam to getpwent and now saslauthd starts and stays running. So that's an improvement. However it still doesn't send email from my phone which claims "no password provided for $address" which is a lie and since it's sasl that changed not my phone, I continue to suspect the sasl2 update broke sendmail.
- Bug#791814: sasl2-bin: fails to start saslauthd Nigel Horne
- Bug#791814: Info received (sasl2-bin: fails to start sasl... Nigel Horne