Hiya,
Today I note there are 38 imap-logins that seem to be stale on our staff imap server, they do not seem to die off, new imap-logins are created with new logins and exit accordingly.
Now, these are from our monitoring software that runs on another server on our LAN. Our corporate link was taken down for 2 hours for urgent relocation of fibre (demolishing old adjoining building, and just in case, they needed to move it which we were glad about), so, this begs the question, why would imap-logins be there I guess in some sort of wait state, even with a still working internal DNS (internal view as well) the only difference is no actual internet connection in this time. A week ago when they first started to working and we lost internet for 45 minutes I also saw a few extra stale imap-logins, but after todays events, I decided this is a bigger issue that needs to be looked into, as dovecot required a restart to clear it all (I wasnt going to sit there killing individual PIDs all evening).
Dovecot version 1.2.17, built from source