It's all about understanding how permissions work. If you don't understand the concept of unix permissions, do a search on google (http://www.google.ca/...&hl=en&meta=). What's happening on this server is that the server runs gmail as one user (eg. nobody). This means when you perform the install from the web, all the files and directories it creates belongs to this user. When you login through SSH/telnet, you might not have enough permissions to write to gmail directories/files because you're not nobody (who owns those files).

To fix the problem below, you'll want to change the permissions of /home/name/public_html/cgi-bin/webmail/data/tmp so that you have enough permissions to write to that directory. You'll be able to do this using FileMan.

Adrian