[Dovecot] error in logs, but system appears to work

[Timo Sirainen]

On 6.9.2011, at 23.09, Chris Hoogendyk wrote:

> 
> 
> On 9/6/11 3:51 PM, Timo Sirainen wrote:
>> On 6.9.2011, at 22.35, Chris Hoogendyk wrote:
>> 
>>> -rw-rw----   1 ebradley mail     9484323 Sep  6 15:16 /var/mail/ebradley
>> Is there any reason for this to be 0660? Most likely not, so your problem goes away simply with chmod 0600 /var/mail/* and at the same time makes your system more secure.
> 
> So, looking at my other system that has been running dovecot for over a year, I see that the entries are mostly 0600, but there are a few 0660. The system I was just implementing has mostly 0660, but some 0600. We had seen occasional similar errors on the other system.
> 
> If I change both systems so that all the directories in /var/mail are 0600, then everything will be happy?

Yep. Basically the problem is that Dovecot thinks they are shared mailboxes and the "mail" group is supposed to have access to them, so it tries to use the mail group for the index files as well, but the process doesn't belong to mail group so it fails.