[Dovecot] Bizarre permissions problem

[Bill Oliver]

Help!

I have been using dovecot for some years with great success.  A little while ago, I changed my mail server from Fedora to CentOS linux. I reinstalled dovecot, and *almost* everything seems to be working, but one thing.  There's *one* user I can't get it to work on without a workaround.  The user is "newuser" and the uid is 1111 (actual name and number changed to protect the innocent).  The error I get in my maillog is:

The error I get in may maillog is:
Aug 29 16:02:11 localbox dovecot: imap(newuser): Error: chown(/home/newuser/mail/.imap/INBOX, -1, 12(mail)) failed: Operation not permitted (egid=1111(newuser), group based on /var/mail/newuser) 
Aug 29 16:02:11 localbox dovecot: imap(newuser): Error: mkdir(/home/newuser/mail/.imap/INBOX) failed: Operation not permitted
Aug 29 16:02:11 localbox dovecot: imap(newuser): Error: chown(/home/newuser/mail/.imap/INBOX, -1, 12(mail)) failed: Operation not permitted (egid=1111(newuser), group based on /var/mail/newuser)
Aug 29 16:02:11 localbox dovecot: imap(newuser): Error: mkdir(/home/newuser/mail/.imap/INBOX) failed: Operation not permitted
Aug 29 16:02:11 localbox dovecot: imap(newuser): Error: chown(/home/newuser/mail/.imap/INBOX, -1, 12(mail)) failed: Operation not permitted (egid=1111(newuser), group based on /var/mail/newuser)
Aug 29 16:02:11 localbox dovecot: imap(newuser): Error: mkdir(/home/newuser/mail/.imap/INBOX) failed: Operation not permitted
Aug 29 16:02:11 localbox dovecot: imap(newuser): Disconnected: Logged out bytes=108/669


Now, it looks to me like dovecot is saying that the user newuser can't
get to the /home/newuser/mail/.imap directory because it doesn't have
permission.  However, the user newuser has all the permissions it needs:

$ ls -la /home/newuser/mail

total 20
drwxrw---- 3 newuser newuser 4096 Aug 29 15:01 .
drwxrw---- 6 newuser newuser 4096 Aug 29 12:16 ..
drwxrwx--- 2 newuser newuser 4096 Aug 29 16:05 .imap
-rw-rw---- 1 newuser newuser  499 Aug 13 07:56 saved-messages
-rw-rw---- 1 newuser newuser 1756 Aug 16 11:15 sent-mail

newuser has the correct uid (1111) in /etc/dovecot/users

newuser *is* the correct uid for that user, i.e.:

$ id -u newuser
1111

the password is correct

Both my web mail package (roundcube) and my android fail.  Both work fine with all other accounts that are set up for imap services.

The workaround, it turns out, is that if I make the directory /home/newuser/.imap/INBOX by hand as the user newuser, then things work.  So, things seem to be working.  However, I just don't understand why *this* user is having problems when none of the others are...

The only thing that sets this user apart from any of the others is that it has administration privileges for the roundcube mailer MySQL database.

Any explanations?

Thanks!


billo