[Dovecot] BOGUS files

[Steffen Kaiser]

On Sun, 3 Jul 2005, Obantec Support wrote:

>> Something is going on with your user permissions. Are you
>> adding/deleting/modifying users [probably while they are logged in]?
>> The system is not able to figure out the user permissions for the mail
>> file, so it is creating those BOGUS files.

Or got different credentials when it accessed the file.

>> What are the permissions on the BOGUS and the user mail files? Are they
>> "username:mail" or something different?
>
> Nope only the user accesses via pop3, he does not even use webmail.

I've seen such bogus-files with the MTA rather than imap/pop. sendmail 
tried to spool the message into the user's inbox in /var/spool/mail and 
determined that the ownership didn't match to the current credentials of 
the user. Also, the access permissions have to match some prerequisites.

> BOGUS is username:mail chmod 600 as is the username file in /var/spool/mail
> which has a link /var/mail to /var/spool/mail

Hmm, if both files really have the same user & group ownership and the 
same access permissions - did the permission of the /var/mail directory 
changed?
Or - well it might happen - are the files owned by the same _numerical_ 
IDs (ls -n).

If Dovecot is doing so (well, try rgrep on the sources), it might mean 
that your user database was returning different results or was 
inaccessable.

Bye,

-- 
Steffen Kaiser