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
sure you're really looking at the correct file.

(This file was created from the wiki on 2007-04-13 14:32)
