On February 20, 2026 12:21:14 PM GMT+02:00, Steve Litt via dovecot <dovecot@dovecot.org> wrote:
Hi all,
I have a working plain text 127.0.0.1:143 Dovecot 2.4.2 on my Qemu VM guest. The following command displays the Receive date, From and Subject for every email in my golugTech mailbox, exactly like the docs say it should:
=================================================== doveadm fetch -u slitt "date.received hdr.from hdr.subject" mailbox golugTech
===================================================
But when I add the -S in order to specify the 127.0.0.1 listener at port 143, it throws the following error:
===================================================
[slitt@mydesk ~]$ cat junk.jnk [root@dovecotvoid dovecot]# doveadm fetch -S 127.0.0.1:143 -u slitt "date.received hdr.from hdr.subject" mailbox golugTech doveadm(slitt): Error: conn 127.0.0.1:143 (127.0.0.1:143): doveadm server sent invalid handshake: * OK Waiting for authentication process to respond.. doveadm(slitt): Error: cmd fetch: 127.0.0.1:143: Command fetch failed for slitt: Connection closed [root@dovecotvoid dovecot]# [slitt@mydesk~]$
===================================================
The docs say -S is to specify the socket_path, and it should be expressed as hostname:port. For hostname, besides 127.0.0.1, I tried localhost and dovecotvoid, the latter of which should not work because dovecotvoid is not 127.0.0.1, it's 10.0.2.15.
The docs say "This allows an administrator to execute doveadm(1) mail commands through the given socket." So I guess finding the server isn't the purpose of socket_path.
My plain text 143 Dovecot 2.4.2 IMAP works just fine without the -S. Is there ever a case where doveadm fetch would need to know the specific address and port of the dovecot IMAP server, and if so, how would I specify it?
Thanks,
SteveT
Steve Litt http://444domains.com
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This is because -S expects *doveadm* server, not imap server. You can use
service doveadm { inet_listener doveadm { port = 12345 } }
to specify one. It can also be unix_listener.
Aki