[Dovecot] imap fails, policy wrong?

[rob at adeed.tele.com]

up until a week or so ago, I had no problem using IMAP logging into a server 
running Fedora Core (I think 4 or 5 ) with dovecot 1.0.  Had used squirrelmail 
and other mail agents using IMAP with no problem.  as of 2 days ago, I 
get a squirrelmail error "ERROR: Connection dropped by IMAP server.
Query: CAPABILITY"   and turning on dovecot debugging shows the following:

audit(1157176740.621:14111): avc:  denied  { search } for  pid=9431 comm="doveco
t" name="rob" dev=dm-0 ino=23560377 scontext=user_u:system_r:dovecot_t:s0 tconte
xt=user_u:object_r:httpd_sys_content_t:s0 tclass=dir

can someone point me in the right direction?  apologies if this doesn't contain
enough info, will try to get more if necesssary, thanks in advance.

(incidentally, the simpler dovecot error message says it can't chdir to 
my $HOME or its parent, but I see no problem with perms or ownership. )

Rob Lingelbach
rob at colorist.org