Deleting symbolic links in home after moving account partition

Everything I have read says that deleting the symbolic link in /home after moving an account to /home2 is safe as long as you aren't using any scripts that are hard coded to use /home, and that makes perfect sense.

However, deleting the symbolic link seems to break incoming emails.  I don't receive emails when I delete it, and I start receiving emails after I restore the symbolic link.  Dovecot is trying to create /home/domain/..... since it doesn't exist.

Why is Dovecot still looking for the old /home locations after the move?  Dovecot should not be looking at /home at all, if the account is in /home2.

When I recreate the symbolic link, it works properly again.

Here is the maillog:

May 28 19:39:51 ny dovecot: imap(bob@domain.com)<5195><aT4vr4cZUudHUGQa>: Error: mkdir(/home/domain/mail/domain.com/bob) failed: Permission denied (euid=1014(domain) egid=1015(domain) missing +w perm: /home, dir owned by 0:0 mode=0711)
May 28 19:39:51 ny dovecot: imap(bob@domain.com)<5195><aT4vr4cZUudHUGQa>: Error: mkdir(/home/domain/mail/domain.com/bob) failed: Permission denied (euid=1014(domain) egid=1015(domain) missing +w perm: /home, dir owned by 0:0 mode=0711)
May 28 19:39:51 ny dovecot: imap(bob@domain.com)<5195><aT4vr4cZUudHUGQa>: Error: mkdir(/home/domain/mail/domain.com/bob) failed: Permission denied (euid=1014(domain) egid=1015(domain) missing +w perm: /home, dir owned by 0:0 mode=0711)
May 28 19:39:51 ny dovecot: imap(bob@domain.com)<5195><aT4vr4cZUudHUGQa>: Error: Mailbox INBOX: Failed to autocreate mailbox: Internal error occurred. Refer to server log for more information. [2024-05-28 19:39:51]
May 28 19:39:51 ny dovecot: imap(bob@domain.com)<5195><aT4vr4cZUudHUGQa>: Error: imap-master: Failed to import client state: Mailbox INBOX: Couldn't open mailbox: Mailbox INBOX: Failed to autocreate mailbox: Internal error occurred. Refer to server log for more information. [2024-05-28 19:39:51]