On Fri, 30 Sep 2011, Knute Johnson wrote:

I'm getting the following message in my log;

dovecot: IMAP(knute):

fchown(/home/knute/mail/.imap/INBOX/dovecot.index.tmp, -1, 8(mail)) failed: Operation not permitted (egid=1000(knute), group based on /var/mail/knute): 4 Time(s)

I got these once before on the /var/mail/user files and changed the permissions to 600. /home/knute/mail/.imap/INBOX is 770 and the index files are 600. Is this a problem with the directory privilege?

Probably. This was discussed a few times before. Check the mailing list archives. Dovecot tries to retain the same file access for the indices as the mailbox/message file it indexes; if the permissions allow access to the group, but the owner is not part of that group, then the dovecot process (which sets UID to the owner) cannot recreate the same permissions, hence the error.

Either change the group ownership of "/var/mail/knute", put user "knute" in group "mail", or chmod it to 0600. The last one is probably the best solution. And fix the problem that created these permissions in the first place.

Check your other users (if you have any) for the same situation.

Joseph Tam <jtam.home@gmail.com>