[Dovecot] fchown() failed

[Timo Sirainen]

On Wed, 2009-08-19 at 13:18 +0100, Arthur Dent wrote:
>     dovecot: Dovecot v1.2.0 starting up (core dumps disabled): 1 Time(s)
>     dovecot: IMAP(mark): fchown() failed with file /home/mark/Mail/.imap/INBOX/dovecot.index.log.newlock: Operation not permitted: 1 Time(s)

v1.2.3+ would have given a bit better error message here. Anyway the
issue is that nowadays Dovecot tries to preserve mailbox's permissions
so that shared mailboxes work properly. What permissions do you have in
the actual INBOX file?

My guess is that you have 0660 permissions of /var/mail/$USER so Dovecot
tries to preserve the group. Easiest fix that also makes your system
more secure is to chmod 0600 it.

> As I access my mailbox several times a day (and certainly did yesterday)
> from several different mail clients I am surprised that the error count
> is only 1 for most the above entries. Is this being caused by some sort
> of cron job (logrotate perhaps)?

It happens only when index files are being created/rotated, which
happens automatically "every once in a while".
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