Hi everyone,
I encountered an issue with mail forwarding (similar to vacation auto-replies) where I was getting persistent errors related to dovecot.lda-dupes.lock permission problems.
After troubleshooting various permission-based solutions, I implemented the following fix:
bash
# Added to /etc/dovecot/conf.d/10-mail.conf
lock_method = fcntl
# Removed the problematic files
rm /home/email/.dovecot.lda-dupes
rm -rf /home/email/.dovecot.lda-dupes.locks/
This switched Dovecot from using dotlock (physical .lock files) to fcntl (kernel-level file locking), which eliminated the permission issues entirely since fcntl doesn’t require creating lock files on disk.
The solution works perfectly - mail forwarding now functions without errors and without compromising security by granting excessive permissions to the email user.
Has anyone encountered similar issues or have experience with this approach? Are there any potential downsides to using fcntl over dotlock that I should be aware of?
Thanks for any insights!