[Dovecot] fchown() error with Public Folders

[Stephen Carville]

On Fri, Mar 13, 2009 at 2:20 PM, Timo Sirainen <tss at iki.fi> wrote:
> On Thu, 2009-03-12 at 11:11 -0700, Stephen Carville wrote:
>> dovecot: IMAP(stephen): fchown() failed with file
>> /home/stephen/Maildir/CS/.Incoming/dovecot.index.log: Operation not
>> permitted
>>
>> As I understand it, dovecot runs as root but the the IMAP process that
>> servicers the request runs as the user so naturally the fchown()
>> fails.
>
> fchown() only tries to change the group, not the owner. It's possible to
> make it succeed by making the process belong to the group.

That explains a lot.  thank you.

> Do you have dovecot-shared file in the .Incoming/ directory? Dovecot
> tries to use that file's group. If you don't want it to do that, you can
> chmod g+s dovecot-shared and it's not preserved.

I have dovecot-shared in the directory.  The part that kept throwing
me was that the user was a member if the group (cs).  I finally
discovered that adding a user to the group must be accompanied by
adding  userdb_system_user=username to the imap.passwd file.

-- 
Stephen Carville