Dear All,

I have installed a new Dovecot 2.0.11 that comes with Fedora 14.
(I used to run Dovecot 1.2.9 of Fedora 12 that does not have this problem.)

I configure the Dovecot as followings:

disable_plaintext_auth = no
# Accept plain text authentication

mail_location = mbox:~/mail:INBOX=/var/mail/%u
# mbox at /home/someUser/mail
# INBOX at /var/mail/someUser

I then telnet localhost 110.

Trying 127.0.0.1...
Connected to localhost.
Escape character is '^]'.
+OK Dovecot ready.
user someUser
+OK
pass secret
-ERR [IN-USE] Couldn't open INBOX: Internal error occurred. Refer to server log for more information. [2011-05-05 16:40:29]
Connection closed by foreign host.

From the /var/log/maillog file, I got this log.

......
May 5 14:30:48 server5 dovecot: pop3-login: Login: user=<someUser>, method=PLAIN, rip=192.168.1.42, lip=192.168.1.7, mpid=12667
May 5 14:30:48 server5 dovecot: pop3(someUser): Error: chown(/home/someUser/mail/.imap/INBOX, -1, 12(mail)) failed: Operation not permitted (egid=501(someUser), group based on /var/mail/someUser)
May 5 14:30:48 server5 dovecot: pop3(someUser): Error: mkdir(/home/someUser/mail/.imap/INBOX) failed: Operation not permitted
May 5 14:30:48 server5 dovecot: pop3(someUser): Error: Couldn't open INBOX: Internal error occurred. Refer to server log for more information. [2011-05-05 14:30:48]
May 5 14:30:48 server5 dovecot: pop3(someUser): Couldn't open INBOX top=0/0, retr=0/0, del=0/0, size=0

I went to /home/someUser/mail and see some directories added:
/home/someUser/mail
/home/someUser/mail/.imap

From the log file above, the errors are:
Error: chown(/home/someUser/mail/.imap/INBOX, -1, 12(mail))
Error: mkdir(/home/someUser/mail/.imap/INBOX)
Error: Couldn't open INBOX

My questions are:
If /mail and /.imap directories can be made, why can't it make the INBOX directory and hence the INBOX (Operation not permitted)?
Is it a file/directory permission problem?
Is it a user problem?
Is it a Dovecot configuration problem?

Please help.
Regards,
Anthony Pong

are you 'root' user.if not then try again as root.not form someuser
and in dovecot.conf uncomment protocol =pop3,imap....

Dear Centos123 and All,

I made all the configurations as root user.
I made the telnet session as someUser (I have also tried root, but it doesn't help).
Dovecot is a service in /etc/init.d/rc.d/dovecot, I don't know what user it is running. (mail, dovecot, root, someUser; I have no idea.)

Yes, I have already specified the protocol in /cet/dovecot/dovecot.conf:
protocols = pop3 imap

Still not solving the problem yet.

Thanks for your reply.
Regards,
Anthony Pong

Dear All,

After 2 weeks, I have found this in the Dovecot Mailing List that solved the problem.

http://dovecot.markmail.org/message/...ackward&page=1

This is part of the reply from Joseph Tam:

I was going to write about the same problem. This got me over the hump:

chmod 0600 /var/spool/mail/*

All my user's mailboxes used to be group=mail mode=0660. I think these settings were left over from Solaris' mail.local: I can't reproduce these permissions now, even for new mailboxes. Maybe it's because the spool directory is now mode=1777 (not g+s mail). Not too keen on these permissions either, but it seems to work.

Dovecot seems to transfer group permissions of the mailbox to its corresponding cache. If it can't set group ownership, you get the fatal error message above. If the original mailbox is mode 0600, dovecot is smart enough not to set group ownership.

I couldn't find this information: shouldn't it be documented here?

Thanks for the help from all.
Regards,
Anthony Pong

One note with adding/removing users, it will leave files behind in imap, and the only way to re-add the user is to:

chown -R user:root (users index) if I remember correctly (down in the indexes)...