Dovecot 2.3 error, FreeBSD 12 in a jail

Hello,

I'm trying to get Dovecot going on my system. It's a FreeBSD 12.0-RELEASE system and it's running dovecot 2.3 via ports in a jail. I'm getting the same error message(s) as in this bug report, which has been marked as closed:

https://bugs.freebsd.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=225078

Dovecot is not starting at all in this jail when starting with service dovecot start. A service dovecot status also reveals the error message about /var/run/dovecot/dovecot.conf file, but a doveconf -n does not reveal any configuration file issues. I did put a symlink in /var/run/dovecot to /usr/local/etc/dovecot/dovecot.conf, this did not correct the issue.

Any suggestions welcome. Thanks. Dave.