Anyway, if one enables mail_chroot in global config file, dovecot will try to access /tmp there. Per-user overrides behave correctly.
For example, with: mail_chroot=/home/vmail dovecot will abort with:Fatal: chdir(/home/vmail/tmp) failed with uid 65534: No such file or directory
Error: imap dump-capability process returned 89 Fatal: Invalid configuration in /etc/dovecot.conf