While configuring mail on a Ubuntu Linux server running the Postfix mail server and Dovecot IMAP server, the following errors were observed in the mail log files,
dovecot: imap(user1): Error: open(/var/mail/user1) failed: Permission denied (euid=1002(user1) egid=1002(user1) missing +w perm: /var/mail, we're not in group 8(mail), dir owned by 0:8 mode=0775) dovecot: imap(user1): Error: Failed to autocreate mailbox INBOX: Internal error occurred. Refer to server log for more information
1.0 Solution
The Dovecot configuration file is /etc/dovecot/dovecot.conf. This file has a line,
!include conf.d/*.conf
which causes inclusion of all files with names ending with .conf in the /etc/dovecot/conf.d directory. The file names start with numbers like, 10, 20, 30, etc., which determines the order in which the files are combined. So, a configuration entry in a file can be overruled by another entry in a later file. The above error is caused by the configuration entry,
mail_location = mbox:~/mail:INBOX=/var/mail/%u
in the /etc/dovecot/conf.d/10-mail.conf file. This indicates that the mailbox to be used for mail retrieval by clients lies in the /var/mail/<username> directory. The actual mailbox to be used for mail retrieval was under Maildir in the user's home directory. The solution involved changing the above line to
mail_location = maildir:~/Maildir
2.0 Getting Dovecot configuration
Since the Dovecot configuration is split across so many files, it would be helpful if we get the full existing configuration via a single command. The command, dovecot -n does just that.
$ dovecot -n # 2.2.22 (fe789d2): /etc/dovecot/dovecot.conf # Pigeonhole version 0.4.13 (7b14904) # OS: Linux 4.5.0-x86_64-linode65 x86_64 Ubuntu 16.04 LTS auth_mechanisms = plain login mail_location = maildir:~/Maildir managesieve_notify_capability = mailto ...
The -n option prints the non-default settings on the standard output. One suggestion is to put all these settings in /etc/dovecot/dovecot.conf and remove the line including files in the conf.d directory. Another option is to put all the settings in a file with name starting with 99, like the file named 99-mail-stack-delivery.conf. As its name starts with 99
, it will be assembled last in the configuration settings. The settings in this file would replace the ones given in earlier
files, having file names starting with smaller numbers.
