I haven't had a chance yet to read this thread carefully, but spamd when run as root in tests will, at least in some cases, set itself to run as user "nobody". If you do that in a subdirectory of your non-nobody user's HOME, the usual permission configuration will not provide read access to nobody and the test will fail.
Would it be worth adding some sort of test for this kind of thing that could make a reasonably explicit "don't run install as root" or "incorrect directory permissions" or some such, to make it more obvious what is going wrong? I seem to remember at least one or two very similar postings here in the last year or so, so it is something that does happen and confuses people.
