For those of you sharing my woes, the answer is this. I am using a self 
signed cert... and needed to add
imap/ssl/novalidate-cert
to the line
$conf['auth']['params']['dsn'] = '{hostname/protocol:port}INBOX';
so it would look like this
$conf['auth']['params']['dsn'] = 
'{hostname/imap/ssl/novalidate-cert:993}INBOX';
-=Tucker