Nevermind. My bad.
Only now did I realize that my dovecot -n is totally missing anything regarding the "service imap-login", which I defined in /etc/dovecot/dovecot.conf as:
service imap-login { service_count=1 process_min_avail = 200 process_limit = 1000 #vsz_limit = 64M }
This brought to mind a recollection that building dovecot from source (& using the init.d startup script from the dovecot wiki) caused it to want to look to: /usr/local/var/run/dovecot/dovecot.conf for its config file. Meaning I edited the wrong file this morning.
I just added the same configuration to the config file at /usr/local/var/run/dovecot/dovecot.conf, and it worked as expected (currently 237 imap-login sessions).
It's time for me to create some sym links so that if I forget this in the future, it won't take me an hour of troubleshooting to remember.
Thanks,
Doug Mortensen Network Consultant Impala Networks P: 505.327.7300