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