I'm not using smail so I can't check this myself, but you might take a look at /etc/suid.conf. If there's an entry for the file, or the directory containing it, then suidmanager will reset the ownership and permissions during the cron.daily run.
On Sun, Oct 03, 1999 at 12:10:06PM +1000, Alan Eugene Davis wrote: > I am sure that my system is in a bad state. I installed from an old > hamm CD, then upgraded by apt-get to slink, thence to potato. For > weeks now I have been living with dozens of messages per day in my > mail box, from Cron Daemon, as follows: > > > runq: setgroups() failed: Operation not permitted > > runq: cannot open /var/log/smail/paniclog: Permission denied > > runq: cannot open /var/log/smail/paniclog: Permission denied > > I tried changing the permissions on paniclog and its directory, with > no avail. > > I found nothing on the recent mailing list archives about paniclog. I > was running runq as root. > > I have just now installed exim instead of smail. > > Does this look familiar?