Renaming not supported across conflicting directory permissions

Question

I get the above error message from dovecot, if I try to rename a IMAP folder (with thunderbird)

Renaming not supported across conflicting directory permissions

if I try to rename "foo" to "foobar"

Here are the directories:

guettli@hz1:/var/spool/mail/guettli/familie/max$ ls -ld foo .
drwxr-sr-x 11 guettli guettli 4096 Nov  9 21:54 .
drwx--S---  5 guettli guettli 4096 Sep 12 20:42 foo

Which permissions are correct?

Glenda

Answer 1

The folder has to match its parent folder's permissions.

Strictly speaking the permissions refer to IMAP permissions, not unix, but I don't think the two are different in this case.

(Btw, I think this is actually a bug in the server. The code appears not to implement what the relevant comment describes. But change the folder's permissions to match those of its parents, and all will be well.)

Remise

Thank you. I changed the permissions like this find -type d -print0 | xargs -r0 chmod --reference . – Glenda

FWIW, I also discussed the issue with the maintainer. The intention is that the rename command should only rename a folder, and not accidentally change its permissions. Makes sense to me. Unfortunately the code is broken if the mailbox itself has different permissions than its parent. – Remise

Answer 2

I had the same problem... changing the permissions in /var/mail/username (chmod go= /var/mail/username) fixed it. Apparently dovecot thinks it's smart to copy the permissions from there instead of the parent directory where it requires the permissions to be the same. And I could rename by the way, but not delete. So not sure if it's exactly the same problem.

Windbag

Answer 3

To clarify more: to be renamable a folder apparently needs to have the same permissions as its imap folder parent. For example, if you have a structure like: a folder called Animals and under that a folder called Cats. then on your mailserver your Maildir directory will include 2 directories: .Animals .Animals.Cats

both of those need to have the same permissions. Not necessarily the same as Maildir.

Jeffrey