🚀 go-pugleaf

Recently, my users have gotten more technically savvy, and have learned
how to change permissions on their home directories.  MMDF requires that
the file .forward be owned by the user, and readable by the user 'mmdf'. 
I'm having trouble making that work.  If users have directory permissions
set to at least 751 (rwxr-x--x), then users' .forwards get read.  However,
750 doesn't cut it.  (Note that all the .forwards are set to 644).  The
users all have the same group id, 'group'.  Normally, 'mmdf' has the group
id 'mmdf' in /etc/passwd, and is listed as part of 'group' in /etc/group. 
When logged in as 'mmdf' I can read everyone's .forward properly.  But
msg.log from MMDF has lines like: 

[SYSERR(13)Permission denied]  lc_forward: stat(/u/gunther/.forward)

whenever a message goes to an account with a .forward.  I have tried 
setting the /etc/passwd group designation of 'mmdf' to 'group' and that 
hasn't helped either.  It's like the system is ignoring group permissions 
on the directories, so that only world file-searching (--x) permission 
allows MMDF to get to the .forward, which it can then read because of 
world-readability on the file.

This is no good for me, since I would like MMDF to be able to read
.forwards no matter what the directory permission.  I want users to be
able to be as paranoid as they want, and still have message forwarding
work.  I have tried chown'ing /usr/mmdf/bin/submit to root (it's setuid), 
but then the system stops working altogether, apparently knowing full 
well that that's an awful security hole.

What can I do?  How do others have MMDF configured to handle user-level 
.forwards?  Is there an MMDF-specific mailing list I can glom onto?

My system is SCO Unix SYSV 3.2.4.2 with the stock MMDF II.

Thanks for any help,
Gunther Anderson