Is it possible that dovecot came with your system and you have actually two dovocots on your system. Then each one of them is using different config file and thats why its working and not working depending on which one you start.
Mike
----- Original Message -----
From: Sam Fung
To: dovecot@dovecot.org
Sent: Thursday, September 29, 2005 11:29 PM
Subject: [Dovecot] sudo /etc/init.d/dovecot start doesn't work

I've been trying to get dovecot working with postfix with virtual domain setting.  I noticed that if I started dovecot with "sudo /usr/sbin/dovecot", everything would work fine.  But if I started with "sudo /etc/init.d/dovecot start", I would get the following permission error.  I checked "ps -ef | grep dovecot" and didn't find anything different.

Sep 29 16:54:35 localhost imap-login: Login: xyz@example.com [::ffff:192.168.0.4]
Sep 29 16:54:36 localhost imap( xyz@example.com): mkdir_parents(/var/spool
/virtual_mailboxes/example.com/xyz/.imap/INBOX) failed: Permission denied

Here's the directory for storing virtual domain email.

[localhost ~]$ sudo ls -al /var/spool/virtual_mailboxes/example.com
total 24
drwx------  3 vuser vuser 4096 Sep 29 16:43 .
drwxrwxr-x  3 root  mail  4096 Sep 21 21:57 ..
drwx------  3 vuser vuser 4096 Sep 29 16:55 xyz

[localhost ~]$ sudo ls -al /var/spool/virtual_mailboxes/example.com/xyz
total 32
drwx------  3 vuser vuser 4096 Sep 29 16:55 .
drwx------  3 vuser vuser 4096 Sep 29 16:43 ..
-rw-------  1 vuser vuser 1209 Sep 29 19:10 Inbox