Please see the various open-source volunteer driven options. When reporting a problem, please remember to first upgrade to latest stable release and see if your problem is reproducible there.
Commercial support
Learn more about the commercial version Dovecot Pro,
including carrier-grade support.
including carrier-grade support.
IRC
You can also contact us over OFTC IRC on channel #dovecot. You need to authenticate with services before you can write to the channel. We encourage you to read
https://workaround.org/getting-help-on-irc prior asking.
FAQ
Why isn't Dovecot working?
- Dovecot always logs an error message if anything goes wrong, so make sure you’re looking at the correct log files. Debug messages may be written to a different log file than error messages. See Logging.
- Are you upgrading? Make sure you read the upgrading documents.
- Make sure you’re modifying the correct config file! Ubuntu creates two of them. Other distributions may also have older config files lying around. For example add “garbage=blah” to the config file and verify that Dovecot now fails to start up.
- Try logging in manually by sending IMAP commands. If you’re trying with an IMAP client you can’t be sure if the problem is with the client’s configuration or Dovecot’s configuration. Many IMAP clients handle all errors simply by showing you the login password dialog, even if the problem has nothing to do with authentication. See TestInstallation (or TestPop3Installation).
- Are you using an old version? If you have a problem, see if NEWS file mentions anything related to it. There are also binary packages available for newer versions.
Why isn't Dovecot logging anything?
v1.x
Dovecot always logs a detailed error message if something goes wrong. If it doesn’t, it’s considered a bug and will be fixed. However almost always the problem is that you’re looking at the wrong log file; error messages may be logged to a different file than informational messages. By default Dovecot logs to syslog using mail facility. You can change the facility from syslog_facility setting. You can also configure Dovecot to write to log files directly, see below.
When using syslog, Dovecot uses 4 different logging levels:
- info: Informational and debug messages.
- warning: Warnings that don’t cause an actual error, but are useful to know about.
- err: Non-fatal errors.
- crit: Fatal errors that cause the process to die.
v2.X
Dovecot always logs a detailed error message if something goes wrong. If it doesn’t, it’s considered a bug and will be fixed. However, almost always the problem is that you’re looking at the wrong log file; error messages may be logged to a different file than informational messages.
You can find the log file locations by running:
doveadm log find
Dovecot log configuration is found in the conf.d/10-logging.conf file in the dovecot configuration folder (usually /etc/dovecot but may also be /usr/local/etc/dovecot).
By default Dovecot logs to syslog using mail facility. You can change the facility from syslog_facility setting. The syslog configuration is often in /etc/syslog.conf or /etc/rsyslog* files. You can also configure Dovecot to write to log files directly, see below.
When using syslog, Dovecot uses 5 different logging levels:
- debug: Debug-level message.
- info: Informational messages.
- warning: Warnings that don’t cause an actual error, but are useful to know about.
- err: Non-fatal errors.
- crit: Fatal errors that cause the process to die.
I'm having trouble after upgrading from v1.x to v2.0
Upgrading Dovecot v1.2 to v2.0
A lot of settings have changed. Dovecot v2.0 can still use most of the v1.x configuration files, but it logs a lot of warnings at startup. A quick and easy way to convert your old config file to v2.0 format is:
# convert old config to new temp config file doveconf -n -c /etc/dovecot/dovecot.conf > dovecot-2.conf # replace the old config file with the new generated file mv dovecot-2.conf /etc/dovecot/dovecot.conf
This command logs a warning about each obsolete setting it converts to the new format. You can simply ignore all the warnings in most cases. If you really want to, you can modify your old config file using the instructions from the warnings, but even that can be done more easily by looking at the generated config file. Some of the warning messages aren’t obvious.
Once running v2.0, it’s safe to downgrade to v1.2.5 or newer. Older versions don’t understand some of the changes to index files and will log errors.
Support
Please see the various open-source volunteer driven options. When reporting a problem, please remember to first upgrade to latest stable release and see if your problem is reproducible there.