DOVEADM-HELP(1)

πŸ’– DOVEADM-HELP(1) πŸ’–

okay bestie, welcome to doveadm-help β€” the part of the Dovecot manual family that tells you stuff about doveadm commands. no cap, it's literally the help page for the help command. meta? iconic? both. πŸŽ€


✨ NAME ✨

doveadm-help β€” shows you information about doveadm commands. that's it, that's the whole job, and she does it flawlessly. πŸ’…


πŸ¦‹ SYNOPSIS πŸ¦‹

doveadm [GLOBAL OPTIONS] help [command]

🌸 DESCRIPTION 🌸

so when you run doveadm help with no command argument at all, she prints out:

  • the synopsis for the most of the doveadm(1) commands πŸ‘‘
  • groups of commands, like log or mailbox 🌈

and when you actually give her the name of a command (or a group), she'll show you the man page for that command. like a personal tour guide but for man pages. obsessed. 🫢


πŸ’œ GLOBAL OPTIONS πŸ’œ

these are the global doveadm(1) options, bestie β€” same energy everywhere:

  • -D β€” turns on verbosity and debug messages. she gets chatty. πŸ—£οΈ
  • -O β€” do not read any config file, just use defaults. the dovecot_storage_version setting defaults to the latest version, but you can override it with -o. no config, no problem. ✨
  • -k β€” preserve the entire environment for doveadm, not just the import_environment setting. keep your whole vibe intact. πŸ’«
  • -v β€” enables verbosity, including a progress counter. so you can watch the numbers go up and feel something. πŸ“ˆ
  • -i instance-name β€” if you're running multiple Dovecot instances, choose the config file based on this instance name. see the instance_name setting for more info. multi-instance girlies, this one's for you. 🧚
  • -c config-file β€” read configuration from the given config-file. by default it first reads the config socket, and then falls back to /etc/dovecot/dovecot.conf. you can also point this at the config socket of some instance running a compatible version. πŸ‘‘
  • -o setting=value β€” overrides the configuration setting from /etc/dovecot/dovecot.conf and from the userdb with the given value. and to override multiple settings, the -o option may be specified multiple times. stack 'em, bestie. πŸ”₯

😭 REPORTING BUGS 😭

found a bug? report it, including the doveconf -n output, to the Dovecot Mailing List ⟨dovecot@dovecot.org⟩. and there's info about reporting bugs available at: ⟨https://dovecot.org/bugreport.html⟩

pls include the doveconf -n output, fr fr β€” it's the difference between "we gotchu" and "we're confused". πŸ™ˆ

πŸŽ€ SEE ALSO πŸŽ€


that's the whole page, bestie β€” go forth and help responsibly. πŸ’–

this was brought to you by Dovecot, revision f979264, dated April 2026. slay, goodbye, mwah. πŸ’…βœ¨πŸŒΈ

πŸ“¦ where this page comes from