Does setting the system time back impair logrotate operation

Your original error messages make no sense with what you're showing for your cron that runs your logrotate.

rotating pattern: /home/mail3/log/popMailProcessing.log  forced from command line (60 rotations)
empty log files are rotated, old logs are removed
considering log /home//log/popMailProcessing.log
error: stat of /home/mail3/log/popMailProcessing.log failed: Permission denied

What are these paths doing going to /home/mail3/log/*? Also what's missing from the /home//log/popMailProcessing.log line? Seems like you're only showing some of the actual situation in your question.

Debugging the issue

Put this line in a shell script, logrotate.sh:

#!/bin/bash
/usr/sbin/logrotate -f -v /etc/logrotate.d/mail3-logs &>> /var/log/logrotate/rotate.log

Make it executable and run it like this from the cron:

03 00 * * * root strace -s 2000 -o /tmp/strace.log /path/to/logrotate.bash

In going through the output you should see what is getting tripped up by the permissions problems.

EDIT #1

After conversing with the OP he mentioned that the above debugging technique uncovered that SELinux was enabled. He was perplexed as to why this was the case since he had previously disabled it with the command setenforce 0.

Disabling SELinux in this fashion will only remain in this state until the next reboot. The default mode for SELinux is dictated by this file on Fedora/CentOS:

$ cat /etc/sysconfig/selinux
# This file controls the state of SELinux on the system.
# SELINUX= can take one of these three values:
#   enforcing - SELinux security policy is enforced.
#   permissive - SELinux prints warnings instead of enforcing.
#   disabled - SELinux is fully disabled.
SELINUX=disabled
# SELINUXTYPE= type of policy in use. Possible values are:
#   targeted - Only targeted network daemons are protected.
#   strict - Full SELinux protection.
SELINUXTYPE=targeted

To permanently disable SELinux you'll want to change the line SELINUX=.. to one of the 3 states, enforcing, permissive, disabled.

I would encourage you however to take the time to understand why SELinux is disallowing the access to the directory these log files are within, and add the appropriate context's so that SELinux allows this access. SELinux is an important part of the layered security model that is facilitated on Linux distros that make use of it, and blindly disabling it is taking one of the critical layers away.

References

• 45.2.7. Enable or Disable SELinux - CentOS 5 user's guide
• 5.4. Enabling and Disabling SELinux - Red Hat 6 user's guide

It's my understanding that logrotate will pass the name of the log file to the script in postrotate; you could use the script and the first parameter and the knowledge that logrotate has created rotated files using the -%s dateformat to generate a list of those files:

import sys
import fnmatch
import os

for file in os.listdir(os.path.dirname(sys.argv[1])):
        if fnmatch.fnmatch(file, os.path.basename(sys.argv[1]) + '-[0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9]'):
                print(file)

This is my first python script, so it may not be idiomatic, but hopefully shows the idea. The fnmatch() function uses a glob that should cover you for several years (until late November of 2286), when 9,999,999,999 seconds will roll over to 10,000,000,000. You could "widen" the glob so that it "just" requires "10 digits and then anything":

...
if fnmatch.fnmatch(file, os.path.basename(sys.argv[1]) + '-[0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9]*'):
...