Running Dovecot
===============

Starting
--------

Dovecot can simply be started by running 'dovecot' as root.

If you wish to, you can also <start Dovecot from inetd or xinetd>
[InetdInstall.txt], but don't try that before you know the Dovecot installation
is actually working.

A sample /etc/init.d script (as provided in Ubuntu 6.06) can be found in
<DovecotInit.txt>

Stopping
--------

Just kill the Dovecot master process with a normal TERM signal, it does a clean
shutdown.'shutdown_clients' setting controls whether existing IMAP and POP3
sessions are killed.

Processes
---------

When Dovecot is running, it uses several processes:

---%<-------------------------------------------------------------------------
# ps auxw|grep "dovecot\|imap\|pop3"
root     25992  0.0  0.1   3512  1248 ?        Ss   Jan02   2:49 dovecot
nobody   25993  0.0  0.1   6260  1920 ?        S    Jan02   0:10 dovecot-auth
nobody   27570  0.0  0.1   6264  1928 ?        S    22:45   0:00 dovecot-auth
-w
dovecot  25994  0.0  0.1   3276  1440 ?        S    Jan02   0:19 pop3-login
dovecot  16809  0.0  0.1   3284  1444 ?        S    04:23   0:03 imap-login
user     27572  0.0  0.0   2156   740 ?        S    22:45   0:00 imap
user     27734  0.0  0.0   2096   948 ?        S    22:51   0:00 pop3
---%<-------------------------------------------------------------------------

 * 'dovecot' process is the Dovecot master process which keeps everything
   running.
 * 'dovecot-auth' process handles all authentication.
 * 'dovecot-auth -w' process is an "authentication worker" process, currently
   only used with MySQL to execute SQL queries.
 * 'imap-login' and 'pop3-login' processes handle new IMAP and POP3 connections
   until user has logged in.
 * 'imap' and 'pop3' processes handle the IMAP and POP3 connections after user
   has logged in.

Reloading Configuration
-----------------------

Send HUP signal to 'dovecot' process. An acknowledgement is written to log
file:

---%<-------------------------------------------------------------------------
dovecot: Jan 08 00:36:45 Warning: SIGHUP received - reloading configuration
---%<-------------------------------------------------------------------------

Note that log file locations aren't changed unless you fully stop and restart
Dovecot.

Rotating Log Files
------------------

If you specified log file paths manually in 'dovecot.conf' instead of using
syslog, you can send USR1 signal to Dovecot to make it close and reopen the log
files.

Troubleshooting
---------------

If you can't see the Dovecot processes running after starting 'dovecot',
something is most likely wrong in your 'dovecot.conf'. Look at the error from
Dovecot's log file. See<Logging.txt> for how to find the log.

If you really can't find any error messages from any logs, try starting Dovecot
with 'dovecot -F'. If you see it crash like:

---%<-------------------------------------------------------------------------
sh: segmentation fault (core dumped)  dovecot -F
---%<-------------------------------------------------------------------------

Then it's a bug in Dovecot. Please report it with your configuration file.

If it simply quits without giving any error, then it wrote the error to a log
file and you just didn't find it. Try specifying the log file manually and make

(This file was created from the wiki on 2007-04-06 04:42)
