[Dovecot] Trying to get Centos5 set up with dovecot

[DCA]

Greetings,

It seems I'm having some trouble getting this message into the list.  I have used this dovecot list before.

I am trying to set up dovecot to replace an older POP3 server in an existing set up.
Currently the server uses sendmail to handle incoming mail. users are in /etc/mail and their incoming eMail lands in the /var/mail/username
in /var/mail the username file is owned by username:mail

I have dovecot configured to create the imap folders in /home/username/mail/
on existing accounts login attempts fail with errors such as:
chown /home/username/mail/.imap/INBOX failed: Operation not permitted egid=500(username), group based on /var/mail/username
mkdir /home/username/mail/imap/INBOX failed: Operation not permitted.

Everything seems to work as expected but only if I add "username" into the "mail" group OR if I have all mailboxes chowned to username:username
Is there any way to tell dovecot to ignore the group ownership of /var/mail/username and focus instead on using username:username for everything in /home/username ?

If I have to add every user to the mail group I can but this seems messy.

Thanks!