From: Kyler Laird <kyler-keyword-dovecot.a0ff9b@lairds.org>

I finally have dovecot mostly working and I was thinking that I'd been saved from having to use UW-IMAPd, but I just now noticed that there doesn't appear to be any way to run dovecot over standard I/O; it always wants to listen on a socket.

There's the "imap" binary that should do exactly that. Usually installed into /usr/local/libexec/dovecot/imap

Or did you mean you wanted to run it from inetd? CVS version supports that too if you execute imap-login.