DOVEADM-PENALTY(1)

💅 doveadm-penalty — the tea on penalties ✨

okay bestie, so this is a page from the Dovecot manual — it's DOVEADM-PENALTY(1) — and it's basically the little command that lets you peek at who's currently in timeout. 👀

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🌸 NAME 🌸

doveadm-penalty — show current penalties 💀

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✨ SYNOPSIS ✨

doveadm [GLOBAL OPTIONS] penalty [-a anvil_socket_path] [ip [/ mask]]

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🦋 DESCRIPTION 🦋

The doveadm penalty command can be used to see the current penalties. that's it, that's the whole vibe. you run it, it shows you who's been bad. 🫶

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🌈 GLOBAL OPTIONS 🌈

these are the global doveadm(1) options, like the universal settings that apply no matter what you're doing:

• -D — turns on verbosity and debug messages. full main character energy, it tells you everything.
• -O — do not read any config file, just use defaults. no cap. the dovecot_storage_version setting defaults to the latest version, but you can override it with -o.
• -k — preserve the entire environment for doveadm, not just the import_environment setting. it keeps everything, periodt.
• -v — enables verbosity, including the progress counter. you get the little progress moments. 🎀
• -i instance-name — if you're running multiple Dovecot instances, this picks which config file to use based on the instance name. see the instance_name setting for more info, iykyk.
• -c config-file — 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. flexible, honestly. 💅
• -o setting=value — overrides the configuration setting from /etc/dovecot/dovecot.conf and from the userdb with the given value. and listen — to override multiple settings, you can specify the -o option multiple times. stack 'em. 🔥

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🎀 OPTIONS 🎀

• -a anvil_socket_path — this option is used to specify an alternative socket. the option's argument is either an absolute path to a local UNIX domain socket, or a hostname and port (hostname:port), in order to connect a remote host via a TCP socket.

by default doveadm(1) will use the socket /rundir/anvil. but heads up — the socket may be located in another directory when the default base_dir setting was overridden in /etc/dovecot/dovecot.conf. so don't be shocked if it's not where you expected. 🙈

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⭐ ARGUMENTS ⭐

• ip [/mask] — to reduce/filter the output, supply an IP address or a network range in CIDR notation (ip/mask). basically: you wanna narrow it down? give it an address. 💖

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🔥 EXAMPLE 🔥

doveadm penalty

IP               penalty last_penalty        last_update
192.0.2.222            3 2010-06-15 15:19:27 15:19:27
192.0.2.53             3 2010-06-15 15:19:34 15:19:34

look at that beautiful little table. penalties and timestamps. iconic. ✨

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💀 REPORTING BUGS 💀

found a bug? report it — and please include the doveconf -n output — to the Dovecot Mailing List ⟨dovecot@dovecot.org⟩. info about reporting bugs is available at: ⟨https://dovecot.org/bugreport.html⟩. do it for the girlies. 🫶

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👑 SEE ALSO 👑

• doveadm(1)

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and that's the whole page, bestie! this one comes from source/version f979264 and it's dated April 2026. stay penalized, stay iconic. 💜🦋✨