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I recently upgraded my server to Mavericks and I thought everything had gone perfectly. As it turns out, that was not exactly the case. After everything working fine for a week or so, I created a new user and my mail server flat out stopped working. Most frustratingly, there were no log errors (in any of the many mail logs) which shed any light on the cause.

After much trial and error, I finally got my mail server functioning (partially) by reinstalling server and restoring the mail folder from the previous day's backup (yay for backups). However, as is often the case, there were MANY permission issues. After slogging through various permission problems, I believe that my system is now receiving mail, however none of my users can check it because every time someone attempts to login the server generates following error:

Error: Failed to autocreate mailbox INBOX: Permission denied

I would assume that this is yet another permissions problem, however after much searching, I still cannot resolve this. To be clear, I don't want Dovecot to autocreate any mailboxes at this point because all of the mailboxes should exist.

Any help on this would be sooooooo greatly appreciated.

P.S. On a side note: why is it that repairing permissions never takes care of difficult issues like these? That would be awfully helpful...

user2965240
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  • 10 to 1 Dovecot is trying to create the INBOX because 1. the directory where the mailboxes are is not configured correctly in your dovecot config or 2. Dovecot doesn't even have permission to stat the MAILDIR. Are you using virtual users? – NickW Nov 07 '13 at 15:15
  • I believe that OSX uses virtual users by default. However, even when I do a chmod -R 777 on mail, I still get the same error... – user2965240 Nov 07 '13 at 15:37
  • So, how is the mail_location set in dovecot.conf? – NickW Nov 07 '13 at 15:48
  • it's actually in 10-mail.conf and it's set as mail_location = maildir:/Library/Server/Mail/Data/mail/%u – user2965240 Nov 07 '13 at 15:51
  • That seems like it should work for virtual users, who is the owner of the mail directory? On linux it can be nobody, or the effective UID/group of the mail owner.. I've seen some pages saying that Apple sets it up as (and expects it to be) _dovecot:mail from 10.7 – NickW Nov 07 '13 at 15:59
  • Yes, should work is correct. Unfortunately, doesn't work also falls into the same category. I've escalated this problem all the way to Apple engineering so maybe they can figure out something that I cannot. – user2965240 Nov 07 '13 at 23:07

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