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

[Steve Ochani]

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.


Thanks


-Steve O.