WHM – There was a problem creating the email account.

One of the chaps that hosts his files with us, encountered a strange problem with his email. First off, two email account he had created in cpanel had dissapeared. He could connect to them in outlook, but no mail could be sent to them. He also described how he could not create any mail accounts either.

He mentioned an error, and upon closer inspection i too experienced the error.

Add a New Email Account
There was a problem creating the email account.
Permission denied: /home/*insertusername*/etc/something passwd passwd

I tried creating mail accounts on one of our websites on that server, and they worked fine. So the problem was apparently only with his account.

I did a few google searches, and nothing really came up. I tweaked what i was searching for and stumbled upon a forum that shed some light on my situation. A chap on there spoke of this problem and someone told him the following fix;

Ask tech support to go into home directory of the account by logging into server as root and fire command
chown username.mail etc -R
It will fix the issue.

I tried it with andys account, and bingo. Another example of how a techies best friend really is the internet.