DOVEADM-SERVICE-STATUS(1)

✨ DOVEADM-SERVICE-STATUS 💅

okay bestie, welcome to the Doveadm manual, section 1 🎀 this is your little backstage pass to peeking at what all the Dovecot services are actually doing right now. no cap, it's giving surveillance but make it cute 🦋

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🌸 NAME 🌸

doveadm-service-status — show information about dovecot services 👀✨

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🌈 SYNOPSIS 🌈

doveadm [GLOBAL OPTIONS] service status [service [...]]

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💖 DESCRIPTION 💖

so doveadm service status spits out a whole table, one line per service, and every line is packed with these little details. let's go through them one by one, bestie, because iykyk that the details are the whole point 🔥

• name — the name of the service 🏷️
• process_count — the number of processes actually running for the service (like, fr fr running, not just vibing)
• process_avail — the number of additional processes that can be spawned for the service
• process_limit — the maximum number of processes that can be active for the service
• client_limit — the maximum number of connections that the service will handle simultaneously
• throttle_secs — seconds to wait before launching another process when processes are dying unexpectedly early for the service 💀
• exit_failure_last — timestamp when the last process was terminated abnormally for the service
• exit_failures_in_sec — number of abnormally terminated processes for the service in the last second 😭
• last_drop_warning — timestamp when the last time a "dropping client connections" warning was logged
• listen_pending — if the master process is queuing connections that need to be dispatched
• listening — if service is listening 👂
• doveadm_stop — if the service has been stopped by doveadm(1)
• process_total — the total number of processes forked for the service since the service start.

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👑 GLOBAL OPTIONS 👑

these are the global doveadm(1) options, babes. they apply across the board:

• -D — Enables verbosity and debug messages. 🐛
• -O — Do not read any config file, just use defaults. The dovecot_storage_version setting defaults to the latest version, but can be overridden with -o.
• -k — Preserve entire environment for doveadm, not just import_environment setting.
• -v — Enables verbosity, including progress counter. 📈
• -i instance-name — If using multiple Dovecot instances, choose the config file based on this instance name. See instance_name setting for more information.
• -c config-file — Read configuration from the given config-file. By default it first reads config socket, and then falls back to /etc/dovecot/dovecot.conf. You can also point this to config socket of some instance running compatible version.
• -o setting=value — Overrides the configuration setting from /etc/dovecot/dovecot.conf and from the userdb with the given value. In order to override multiple settings, the -o option may be specified multiple times. 🔁
• -f formatter — Specifies the formatter for formatting the output. Supported formatters are:
  • flow — prints each line with key=value pairs.
  • json — prints a JSON array of JSON objects.
  • pager — prints each key: value pair on its own line and separates records with form feed character (^L).
  • tab — prints a table header followed by tab separated value lines.
  • table — prints a table header followed by adjusted value lines.

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🎀 ARGUMENTS 🎀

• service (optional) — Filters the list according to the specified service or services. By default, all dovecot services are listed. 🌟

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🦋 EXAMPLES 🦋

okay so here's what it looks like when you just run it, no filter, living its best life:

doveadm service status

name: imap-login
process_count: 0
process_avail: 0
process_limit: 1
client_limit: 1000
throttle_secs: 0
exit_failure_last: 0
exit_failures_in_sec: 0
last_drop_warning: 0
listen_pending: n
listening: y
doveadm_stop: n
process_total: 0

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😭 REPORTING BUGS 😭

found a bug? not the vibe, but okay, we handle it 🫶 Report bugs, including doveconf -n output, to the Dovecot Mailing List ⟨dovecot@dovecot.org⟩. Information about reporting bugs is available at: ⟨https://dovecot.org/bugreport.html⟩

bestie pls include that doveconf -n output, they literally need it 🙏

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💜 SEE ALSO 💜

doveadm(1), doveadm-process-status(1)

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and that's the whole page, periodt 💅✨ this was Doveadm manual, section 1, source version f979264, dated April 2026 — go forth and check on your services, queen 👑🌈