In my system:
# ls -l /var/list/.bin/flist -rwsr-xr-x 5 root list 25432 ene 18 2007 /var/list/.bin/flist
Those are also the permissions of the executable inside the .deb. Either those permissions were lost during the conversion to .rpm, or maybe you changed them after installing the package.
I didn't change it. Now I chmod my flist to be: -rwsr-xr-x 5 list list 25432 Jan 18 2007 /var/list/.bin/flist and I still get the same "deferral: /bin/sh:_/var/list/.bin/flist:_Permission_denied/" error.
Two things: 1. The permissions/ownerships are not the same yet. My flist is owned by root, yours is still owned by list. 2. flist is an ELF binary. Why is he trying to execute as a sh-script? Does your /etc/aliases have entries like these ones?: foo: "|/var/list/.bin/flist foo" foo-request: "|/var/list/.bin/flist foo-request" (or whatever the qmail-equivalent might be).