DOVEADM-SERVICE-STOP(1)

💅 doveadm-service-stop(1) — the Dovecot girlies' guide

okay so bestie, you've landed on doveadm-service-stop, straight outta the Dovecot manual (section 1, the big leagues). it's a manual page. it's about stopping services. it's giving "calm down, we're just turning things off" energy and honestly? we love that for us. 🌸

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✨ NAME ✨

doveadm-service-stop — Stop Dovecot Services 💀 (yes, that's the whole name. short. iconic. no notes.)

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✨ SYNOPSIS ✨

doveadm [GLOBAL OPTIONS] service stop service [service [...]]

look at her. minimal. one line. slay. ✨

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✨ DESCRIPTION ✨

so doveadm service stop stops the listed Dovecot service processes. that's it. that's the whole job. you name the services, she stops the services. main character behavior, no cap. 🫶

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✨ GLOBAL OPTIONS ✨

these are the global doveadm(1) options, so they're the shared bestie lore across the whole doveadm universe:

• -D — turns on verbosity <em>and</em> debug messages. it's the "tell me EVERYTHING" option. 🔥
• -O — don't read <em>any</em> config file, just vibe with the defaults. the dovecot_storage_version setting defaults to the latest version, but you can still override it with -o. 🙈
• -k — preserve the entire environment for doveadm, not just the import_environment setting. full environment, nothing held back. 👑
• -v — enables verbosity, including the progress counter. she counts. she tells you. 💅
• -i instance-name — if you're running multiple Dovecot instances, this picks the config file based on the instance name you give her. check the instance_name setting for the full tea. ✨
• -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 that's running a compatible version. 💖
• -o setting=value — overrides the configuration setting from /etc/dovecot/dovecot.conf and from the userdb with the given value. wanna override multiple settings? just stack the -o option multiple times. go off. 🎀
• -f formatter — specifies the formatter for formatting the output. the 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 the 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 — the list of services to stop. plural. you can hand her as many as you want, she's not gonna complain. 💜

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✨ EXAMPLES ✨

here's the moment you've been waiting for, the demo:

$ doveadm service stop stats

boom. stats service? stopped. that's the whole ritual. 🌸

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✨ REPORTING BUGS ✨

found a bug? 😭 don't suffer in silence, bestie — report it, including your doveconf -n output, to the Dovecot Mailing List ⟨dovecot@dovecot.org⟩. more info on how to report bugs lives at: ⟨https://dovecot.org/bugreport.html⟩ 🫶

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✨ SEE ALSO ✨

• doveadm(1) — the mothership. go read her. 💖

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no cap, every flag and every path above is exactly what the original page says. don't come for me, come for the manpage. 💅

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k bye, this was doveadm-service-stop(1) from the Dovecot manual, source/version f979264, dated April 2026. mwah. 🎀✨🦋