Hello everyone,

I've narrowed down my problem, so this should be an easy one for some smart person out there.

I am moving from an old sendmail/Fedora 2 box to a new sendmail/Fedora 4 box and want to try Dovecot for pop3. The problem is, I can't get it to work. I have 9000 email accounts I will be moving to the new box. I've already tried and failed once. The problem is, Dovecot wants a home directory for each one. We don't use home directories. So, when I try to pop one of the accounts that was moved over, /var/log/maillog shows:

Nov 1 14:33:47 sendmail pop3(chayes): mkdir_parents(/home/chayes/mail/.imap/INBOX) failed: Permission denied Nov 1 14:33:47 sendmail pop3(chayes): Couldn't open INBOX: Internal error occured. Refer to server log for more information. [2005-11-01 14:33:47]

-or-

Nov 1 14:29:18 sendmail pop3(chayes): mbox: Can't create root IMAP folder /home/chayes/mail: Permission denied Nov 1 14:29:18 sendmail pop3(chayes): Failed to create storage with data: mbox:/var/spool/mail/chayes

But if I create folders /home/chayes/ and /home/chayes/mail with user and group set to chayes, then it works.

By the way, I've tried about 20 different iterations of the default_mail_env parameter. This is the one I'm using at the moment:

default_mail_env = mbox:/var/spool/mail/%u

Bottom line is, if Dovecot has to have a home directory, then I guess I'll have to go back to pop3d, which doesn't.

Thanks,

Cliff