[Dovecot] stat() failed with mbox /var/mail/%u

[Jungshik Shin]

Hello,

Over the last 12 hours or so, I've been wrestling with a mysterious
dovecot issue. After upgrading a mail server I'm helping my friend with
maintaining  from Fedora Core1 to Fedora Core4, I realized that I
couldn't use UW-IMAP4 anymore (well, I can compile it myself, but it
turned out that UW-IMAP was the main cause of the server's having load
average as high as 30 from time to time so that I decided to move onto
dovecot).

Although I loved to migrate to maildir,  I didn't dare to tackle the
migration (I have a lot more important things to do :-)) to maildir.
Instead, I thought that dovecot's indexing of mbox files should make the
performance of the server a lot better than UW-IMAP. (in addition, we
upgraded the HW from P3 800MHz single to P4 dual 3GHz).  Last night, I
experimented with several mboxes of one user's account (INBOX in
/var/mail/<userid> and others in ~/mail/) and it worked perfectly well.
So, I moved mboxes of other users and launched 'dovecot' informing users
that the mail server is back up again. However, it didn't work with
inbox (for IMAP) and POP3. There's no problem accessing mail folders in
'~/mail', but accessing /var/mail/%u (inbox for IMAP) and using the same
folder with POP3 didn't work.


The error I got in the log file is:

Jul  8 01:17:24 biosoft dovecot: pop3-login: Login: xyz123
[::ffff:1xx.2yy.zz.178]
Jul  8 01:17:24 biosoft dovecot: POP3(xyz123): stat() failed with mbox
file /var/mail/xyz123: Permission denied

Jul  8 00:34:45 biosoft dovecot: imap-login: Login: xyz123
[::ffff:1xx.2yy.zz.178]
Jul  8 00:34:45 biosoft dovecot: auth(default): Error sending status
request (Operation not permitted)
Jul  8 00:34:45 biosoft dovecot: imap-login: Login: xyz123
[::ffff:1xx.2yy.zz.178]
Jul  8 00:34:45 biosoft dovecot: IMAP(xyz123): stat() failed with mbox
file /var/mail/xyz123: Permission denied

ls -ld / /var /var/mail/ /var/mail/xyz123
drwxr-xr-x  23 root  root      4096 Jul  7 19:28 /
drwxr-xr-x  26 root  root      4096 Jul  7 23:35 /var
drwxrwxrwt   2 root  mail      4096 Jul  8 00:36 /var/mail/
-rw-rw----   1 xyz123 mail 130751237 Jul  7 23:37 /var/mail/xyz123



I tried various combinations of permissions and ownerships for /var/mail
(1777, 2775) and /var/mail/<userid>, but nothing made any difference.  I
also tweaked mbox locking methods ('dotlock fcntl' or 'fcntl' alone)
When I came across this problem with the latest stable (2005-07-06), I
went back to FC4's default package (0.99??), but with a slightly
different error message in the log file, basically I had the same problem.

I kept the default values for most configuration parameters. What I
changed are listed below:

mail_extra_groups = mail
 pop3_uidl_format = %08Xv%08Xu
protocols = imap imaps pop3s
default_mail_env = mbox:~/mail/:INBOX=/var/mail/%u

Also attached is the entire /etc/dovecot.conf

I'm really desperate to get some enlightening answers on this problem,
for which I'll really appreciate you.

Thanks tons in advance,

Jungshik









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