[Dovecot] Permission denied creating inbox file in /var/mail

[Tom Diehl]

On Thu, 31 Jul 2008, Steve Ochani wrote:

> Hello all,
>
> I'm using dovecot version 1.07 on CentoOS 5 (clone of RHEL 5).
>
> When there is no existing mbox file for a user in /var/mail I get the following error:
>
> ---------------
> Jul 31 16:32:32 newnewton dovecot: imap-login: Login: user=<testm2>, method=PLAIN,
> rip=::ffff:127.0.0.1, lip=::ffff:127.0.0.1, secured
> Jul 31 16:32:32 newnewton dovecot: IMAP(testm2): open(/var/mail/testm2, O_CREAT)
> failed: Permission denied
> Jul 31 16:32:32 newnewton dovecot: IMAP(testm2): access() failed with mbox file
> /var/mail/testm2: No such file or directory
> Jul 31 16:32:32 newnewton dovecot: IMAP(testm2): stat() failed with mbox file
> /var/mail/testm2: No such file or directory
> Jul 31 16:32:32 newnewton dovecot: IMAP(testm2): Connection closed
> ----------------
>
>
> My persimmons on /var/mail (which is a symlink to /var/spool/mail) :
>
> drwxrwxr-x 2 root mail 4096 Jul 31 16:32 mail
>
> I have tried adding the mail group as mail_privileged_group, the output of dovecot -n :
>
> --------------------
> # 1.0.7: /etc/dovecot.conf
> login_dir: /var/run/dovecot/login
> login_executable(default): /usr/libexec/dovecot/imap-login
> login_executable(imap): /usr/libexec/dovecot/imap-login
> login_executable(pop3): /usr/libexec/dovecot/pop3-login
> mail_privileged_group: mail
> mail_location: mbox:~/IMAPmail:INBOX=/var/mail/%u
> mail_executable(default): /usr/libexec/dovecot/imap
> mail_executable(imap): /usr/libexec/dovecot/imap
> mail_executable(pop3): /usr/libexec/dovecot/pop3
> mail_plugin_dir(default): /usr/lib/dovecot/imap
> mail_plugin_dir(imap): /usr/lib/dovecot/imap
> mail_plugin_dir(pop3): /usr/lib/dovecot/pop3
> auth default:
>  passdb:
>    driver: pam
>  userdb:
>    driver: passwd
> --------------------
>
>
> Here is the permission on /etc/dovecot.conf
>
> -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 42833 Jul 31 15:30 /etc/dovecot.conf
>
>
> I've searched google and the mailing list archive and tried the couple of things commonly
> suggested.
>
> As for a test I changed perms on /var/spool/mail to 777 and then dovecot made the inbox file.
> The file ended up being owned by the user and the group owner was the group that the user
> belongs to, not mail.
>
> When I create new users using useradd there is a 0 byte file created in /var/mail for the user
> but I use scripts to create student accounts every semester (about 10,000) so I'm trying to
> avoid having to add more things that the script will have to create.
>
> Any help is greatly appreciated.

I am not sure if this is the right answer or not but how about
"chmod 1777 /var/spool/mail"? I do this so that procmail can write to the
mail spool.

HTH,

Regards,

-- 
Tom Diehl		tdiehl at rogueind.com		Spamtrap address mtd123 at rogueind.com