[Dovecot] stopping dovecot

This may be a silly question but how to correctly stop dovecot and be sure that it's possible to start it again?

kill -TERM cat /var/run/dovecot/master.pid doesn't work well.

I have imap-login processes staying arround and occupying port which leads to Fatal: listen(0.0.0.0, 993) failed: Address already in use when trying to start again 2s after stopping.

-- Arkadiusz Miśkiewicz PLD/Linux Team arekm / maven.pl http://ftp.pld-linux.org/