[Dovecot] Reading emails, vmail user mail access problems.

[David Haggard]

Hello,

I have a new installation of Ubuntu 10.04 64bit and all packages are from the Ubuntu repos.

dovecot version 1.2.9

My goal is to have a basic email server setup with imap and pop support so imap users can send and receive email for the company.

Setup: I have a few users that will be using this mail server so I do not need anything advanced and I am ok with creating a user account with a password and managing email addresses manually.  I currently have system accounts for a test user and I have setup virtual mailbox as this mail server will host 2+ domains.

Postfix is installed and running, I also confirmed mail flow to this box and from this box is working to the test user created.  I can log in with the test username of the system and this is the point at which I have some issues as I am having a permission problem which I think is related to dovecot.

What I am not able to do is download emails via imap client, but I can send emails just fine.  If I change the permissions of the virtual mailbox to the test user that is logged in to chmod 777 I can download emails, but I can't do this for each new email to that users mailbox.

/var/vmail/DOMAIN/USER1/cur/   and anything listed here will be owned by vmail so no other user can read it. (can't download emails) as dovecot seems to be trying to use USER1 as a user to read the files.  How can I have dovecot read emails as vmail no matter what user logs in?  I have tried many config changes using vmail but its failed so I need some advise.

Here is my config:

I edited the DOMAIN to hide the real domain used.

# 1.2.9: /etc/dovecot/dovecot.conf
# OS: Linux 2.6.32-21-server x86_64 Ubuntu 10.04 LTS ext4
log_timestamp: %Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S 
protocols: imap imaps pop3 pop3s
disable_plaintext_auth: no
login_dir: /var/run/dovecot/login
login_executable(default): /usr/lib/dovecot/imap-login
login_executable(imap): /usr/lib/dovecot/imap-login
login_executable(pop3): /usr/lib/dovecot/pop3-login
mail_location: maildir:/var/vmail/DOMAIN/%n/
mbox_write_locks: fcntl dotlock
mail_executable(default): /usr/lib/dovecot/imap
mail_executable(imap): /usr/lib/dovecot/imap
mail_executable(pop3): /usr/lib/dovecot/pop3
mail_plugin_dir(default): /usr/lib/dovecot/modules/imap
mail_plugin_dir(imap): /usr/lib/dovecot/modules/imap
mail_plugin_dir(pop3): /usr/lib/dovecot/modules/pop3
auth default:
  passdb:
    driver: pam
  userdb:
    driver: passwd
  userdb:
    driver: static
    args: uid=vmail gid=vmail home=/var/vmail/DOMAIN/%n/


Thank you