[Dovecot] Access denied when client is connecting

[Florian Wörter]

Hello!

I'm having a problem with dovecot on my gentoo linux box. it would be great
if you could help me.
i'm planing to use dovecot as imap server. the incoming mails for the
different useres are fetched by getmail. for every user a script should be
called, which fetches the e-mails of this user from a pop3 server and puts
them in ~/mailbox/new. this allready works.
now i installed dovecot but everytime a client connects, i find these lines
in my dovecot logfile (/var/log/dovecot.log)
dovecot: Feb 16 09:08:09 Fatal: chdir(/home/woefl81) failed with uid 1001:
Permission denied
dovecot: Feb 16 09:08:09 Error: child 16211 (imap) returned error 89 (Fatal
failure)

the username of the connected user is woefl81, his user id is 1001 and his
home directory is /home/woefl81/.

i can't figure out why this user has no permission for  his own files. well,
for testing i now adjusted the directory permissions:

in /:
drwxr-xr-x  5 root root  152 Feb 10 09:19 home

in /home:
drwxr-xr-x  6 woefl81   users     296 Feb 11 08:27 woefl81

in /home/woefl81:
drwxrwxrwx 5 woefl81 users 120 Feb  9 13:09 mailbox

in /home/woefl81/mailbox:
drwxrwxrwx 5 woefl81 users 120 Feb  9 13:09 .
drwxr-xr-x 6 woefl81 users 296 Feb 11 08:27 ..
drwxrwxrwx 2 woefl81 users  48 Feb  9 13:09 cur
drwxrwxrwx 2 woefl81 users 120 Feb  9 13:13 new
drwxrwxrwx 2 woefl81 users  48 Feb  9 13:13 tmp

and finally in /home/woefl81/mailbox/new i find the email which was
retrieved by getmail:
drwxrwxrwx 2 woefl81 users  120 Feb  9 13:13 .
drwxrwxrwx 5 woefl81 users  120 Feb  9 13:09 ..
-rwxrwxrwx 1 woefl81 users 4.6K Feb  9 13:13
1234181629.M605602P32438Q0R5b6a645fa35278a9.proxystu

as i said before i adjusted the rights for the mailbox subdir for testing to
0777, so everyone really should be able to do everything...

my dovecot version is 1.1.11

my config:

# 1.1.11: /etc/dovecot/dovecot.conf
# OS: Linux 2.6.27-gentoo-r7 i686 Gentoo Base System release 1.12.11.1
log_path: /var/log/dovecot.log
info_log_path: /var/log/dovecot_info.log
protocols: imap
ssl_cert_file: /etc/ssl/dovecot/server.pem
ssl_key_file: /etc/ssl/dovecot/server.key
disable_plaintext_auth: no
login_dir: /var/run/dovecot/login
login_executable: /usr/libexec/dovecot/imap-login
login_chroot: no
verbose_proctitle: yes
mail_location: maildir:~/mailbox
auth default:
  passdb:
    driver: pam
    args: *
  userdb:
    driver: passwd

the user woefl81 is a "normal" system user (from /etc/passwd):
woefl81:x:1001:100::/home/woefl81:/bin/bash

his main group is users.

on the client i installed mozilla tunderbird.. the user connects to the ip
of the linux box with his username (woefl81) and the same password as his
account pwd on the linux box.

it would be great if somebody had an idea what else i should try to get
dovecot to work as imap server. thank you very much in advance!

best regards, Florian