I have a mail server that uses fetchmail to take mail from our ISP's POP3 server. It stores it locally so we can use IMAP. I'm using sendmail + procmail to receive the mail and I use dovecot to let our users access it. I'm running on Fedora Core 3.

It has been working perfectly for a long time. Today I added a new user with /usr/sbin/useradd. Any mail sent to this user (locally using sendmail from the command line) is put in /var/mail/newuser instead of homedir/.Maildir/. As far as I can tell there are no differences between this user and the other ones. /etc/procmailrc just has one line: DEFAULT=$HOME/.Maildir/

/home/newuser/.Maildir does exist and has the same permissions as everyone else's .Maildir directory. It is owned by newuser:mail.

Also, when I try to log into dovecot with the newuser account, thunderbird just spins around and doesn't log in. /var/log/maillog says

Sep 27 15:21:01 amun dovecot: chdir(/home/newuser) failed with uid 513: Permission denied
Sep 27 15:21:01 amun imap-login: Login: newuser [::ffff:192.168.6.110]
Sep 27 15:21:01 amun dovecot: child 4553 (imap) returned error 89
Sep 27 15:30:56 amun dovecot: chdir(/home/newuser) failed with uid 513: Permission denied
Sep 27 15:30:56 amun imap-login: Login: newuser [::ffff:192.168.6.110]
Sep 27 15:30:56 amun dovecot: child 4557 (imap) returned error 89


I thought it might be an SELinux issue, but that is disabled. I've restarted sendmail and dovecot, and then I restarted the whole computer. Still no luck.

I need to turn in my nerd membership card. /home/newuser had permission 600 but of course needed 700. So the user couldn't read from it or write to it or any subdirectories.