1

I am following a guide to setup a mail server and accounts on a Debian 7 OS and they ask to set up a folder permissions to match this:

drwxrwsr-x 3 root vmail 4096 Jan 24 21:23 /var/mail

But my server shows it like this:

drwxrwsrwt 2 root mail 4096 Oct 30 17:00 /var/mail

I was googling about setting up folder permissions but all tutorials show how to do it with number using chmod command. How would you translate this letters into numbers ?

Improve this question

2 Answers 2

Reset to default
1

Use: chmod 1775 /var/mail.

Note that you can also change the existing record like this: chmod o-wt /var/mail

Improve this answer
3

Never use MTA's built-in delivery agent. Never.

Use dovecot-lda aka deliver instead. Then you'll get completely separated MTA and POP/IMAP servers. Local mail storage should be owned by POP/IMAP server. postfix invokes dovecot-lda that acts with dovecot's config and UID. Otherwise you'll stuck with permissions and will be forced to set wide-open permissions to the mailboxex - like 1775. When LDA moved to the dovecot, you can restrict access to the mailboxes to the 700. The other benefit of the dovecot-lda is that only one config-file contains path to the local storage and you'll never be catched when postfix and dovecot points to the different locations. Less obvious but way more signifacant benefits are that you'll get access to the dovecot mail filter sieve and autoresponder.

There is no reasons to use built-in LDA.

Improve this answer
1
  • Touché! I had problems with authentication which could be solved with permissions and this info from Kondybas helped me. Thanks
    – Jack
    Oct 31, 2014 at 3:32

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .