Permissions problem with mdbox maildir

[Steffen Kaiser]

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On Wed, 18 Feb 2015, Emanuel Evans wrote:

> Hi! Apologies if this has come up before, or if this is a duplicate
> posting (I tried posting before but I think it got lost). Anyways, I'm
> trying to set up an IMAP server with dovecot, and everything seems to be
> more or less working except that I periodically see error messages like
> this in my logs:
>
>  Feb 18 01:01:15 stark dovecot: lmtp(31956, root at aleme.nu): Error: link(/var/decrypted/vmail/aleme.nu/root/mailboxes/INBOX/dbox-Mails/dovecot.index, /var/decrypted/vmail/aleme.nu/root/mailboxes/INBOX/dbox-Mails/dovecot.index.backup.tmp) failed: Operation not permitted
>
> I'm assuming it's a permissions problem with my maildir, but I can't
> figure out what the relevant process is in order to fix it. The maildir
> is owned by vmail with permissions set to 700; here is the output of
> dovecot -n:
>
>  # 2.1.7: /etc/dovecot/dovecot.conf
>  # OS: Linux 3.2.0-4-amd64 x86_64 Debian 7.8 fuse.encfs

>  userdb {
>    args = uid=vmail gid=vmail home=/var/vmail/%d/%n
>    driver = static
>  }

> As you can see, I'm keeping the maildir on an encfs-encrypted volume, in
> case that's relevant. Please let me know any ideas for why this might be
> happening. Thanks in advance!

Could you try what happens, if you create the hardlink manually as the 
vmail user _two_ times, if the first link() succeeds. Maybe:

1) hard links won't work on your encfs,
2) link() fails with "Operation not permitted" instead of "File exists" in 
your case, if the target file already exists.

Something like: sudo -u vmail ln  \
/var/decrypted/vmail/aleme.nu/root/mailboxes/INBOX/dbox-Mails/dovecot.index \
/var/decrypted/vmail/aleme.nu/root/mailboxes/INBOX/dbox-Mails/dovecot.index.backup.tmp

- -- 
Steffen Kaiser
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