I am at wits end...So far it seems dovecot is light years ahead of UW-IMAP.  Glad to have UW-IMAP behind me...well almost.
 
My setup = Sendmail 8.13.4 with Procmail delivery to /var/spool/mail/<userfile>
                openssl 0.9.8
                dovecot 0.99.11
 
I want to continue to use the standard mbox with all the user's mail stored in /var/spool/mail/<userfile>.  User's are known to this mail server via NIS and ALL data is mounted accress NFS in read only mode on this machine, including ~home directories.  I want to run dovecot like UW-IMAP...trying to keep it simple-->mail delivery to mbox /var/spool/mail/<username>.
 
My /etc/dovecot.conf:
 
I tried both default_ mail_env = INBOX:/var/spool/mail/%u:INBOX:INDEX=MEMORY with and with out the INBOX:INDEX=MEMORY
 
I want to disable the indicies feature.  We don't need it we're about 20 engineers or so who want to continue to use the /var/spool/mail mbox-the original Sendmail location.
 
Most users are downloading every piece of mail through OutHouse or Pine, aka OutLook.
 
I keep getting failed to create storage meaages in /var/log/maillog...
 
Jul 21 15:53:26 mailtest pop3-login: Login: nickr [::ffff:172.26.64.2]
Jul 21 15:53:26 mailtest pop3(nickr): Failed to create storage with data: INBOX:/var/spool/mail/nickr
Jul 21 15:53:26 mailtest dovecot: child 4773 (pop3) returned error 89
 
Permissions info for /var/spool/mail/nickr:
 
drwxrwxrwt   3 root   mail        4096 Jul 21 15:43 mail
[root@mailtest mail]# ls -la nickr
total 4204
drwxrwxrwx  2 nickr mail    4096 Jul 21 15:19 .
drwxrwxrwt  3 root  mail    4096 Jul 21 15:43 ..
-rwxrwxrwx  1 nickr ftp        0 Jul 21 14:56 inbox
-rwxrwxrwx  1 nickr mail    2375 Jul 21 15:12 msg.FAUO
-rwxrwxrwx  1 nickr mail 4256870 Jul 20 16:55 nickr
 
As you can see I am spoping just fine....
 
Thanks in advance for ANY help!!!!!!!!!