SIEVE-DUMP(1)

💅 SIEVE-DUMP(1) — bestie edition

okay so real quick, this page lives in the Dovecot manual, and it's all about sieve-dump. buckle up 🎀

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✨ NAME ✨

sieve-dump — Pigeonhole's Sieve script binary dump tool. yes that's the whole vibe. 🦋

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🌸 SYNOPSIS 🌸

sieve-dump [options] sieve-binary [out-file]

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💖 DESCRIPTION 💖

so sieve-dump is part of Pigeonhole (pigeonhole(7)), which is the thing that adds Sieve (RFC 5228) and ManageSieve (RFC 5804) support to Dovecot (dovecot(1)). iconic behaviour tbh.

here's the tea: Sieve binaries — the ones that get produced by stuff like sievec(1) — can be transformed by sieve-dump into a human-readable textual representation. and like, that's actually so useful, because it gives you real insight into how the Sieve script is being executed. it's also especially handy for looking at corrupt binaries, which can happen from bugs in the Sieve implementation (😭 rip). but bestie, heads up: this tool is intended mainly for development purposes, so normally system administrators and users will not need to use it. it's giving internal-dev-tool energy, fr fr.

the format of the output is not explained here in detail, but it should be relatively easy to understand. the Sieve binaries comprise a set of data blocks, and each of those can contain arbitrary data. for the base language implementation, two blocks are used:

1. the first one contains a specification of all required language extensions
2. the second one contains the main Sieve program

compiled Sieve programs are represented as flat byte code, which means the dump of the main program is a disassembly listing of the interpreter operations. extensions can define new operations and use additional blocks. therefore, the output of sieve-dump depends greatly on the language extensions that were used when compiling the binary. no cap. 💅

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⭐ OPTIONS ⭐

• -c config-file — alternative Dovecot configuration file path. 🗂️
• -D — enable Sieve debugging. turn it on when you wanna see everything, bestie 🔍
• -h — produce per-block hexdump output of the whole binary instead of the normal human-readable output. raw bytes mode, so crunchy 💀
• -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. stack 'em up 🫶
• -u user/mask — run the command only for the given user. it's also possible to use '*' and '?' wildcards (e.g. -u *@example.org). wildcard slay ✨
• -x auth_info — auth_info specifies additional conditions for the user command. the auth_info option string has to be given as name = value pair. for multiple conditions the -x option could be supplied multiple times.

possible names for the auth_info are:

• service — the service for which the userdb lookup should be tested. the value may be the name of a service, commonly used with Dovecot. for example: imap, pop3 or smtp.
• session — session identifier.
• lip — the local IP address (server) for the test.
• rip — the remote IP address (client) for the test.
• lport — the local port, e.g. 143
• rport — the remote port, e.g. 24567
• real_lip — the local IP to which the client connected on this host.
• real_rip — the remote IP where client connected from to this host.
• real_lport — the local port to which client connected to to this host.
• real_rport — the remote port from where the client connected from to this host.
• forward_<field> — field to forward as %{forward:field} to auth process.

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🎀 ARGUMENTS 🎀

• sieve-binary — specifies the Sieve binary file that needs to be dumped. this one's the main character, you literally cannot skip it 👑
• out-file — specifies where the output must be written. this argument is optional. if omitted, the output is written to stdout. so chill of it 🌈

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💜 EXIT STATUS 💜

sieve-dump will exit with one of the following values:

• 0 — dump was successful. (EX_OK, EXIT_SUCCESS) we love to see it 🥳
• 1 — operation failed. this is returned for almost all failures. (EXIT_FAILURE) the sad path 😭
• 64 — invalid parameter given. (EX_USAGE) you typed something weird bestie 🙈

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🧚 FILES 🧚

• /etc/dovecot/dovecot.conf — Dovecot's main configuration file.
• /etc/dovecot/conf.d/90-sieve.conf — Sieve interpreter settings (included from Dovecot's main configuration file)

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🔥 REPORTING BUGS 🔥

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⟩

okay so genuinely: include that doveconf -n output. the devs need it and skipping it is a crime 💀

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🦋 SEE ALSO 🦋

dovecot(1), dovecot-lda(1), sieve-filter(1), sieve-test(1), sievec(1), pigeonhole(7)

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and that's the whole page, bestie 💖 this build is tagged f00471c, dated August 2026, and it's from the Dovecot crew. go dump some binaries and stay hydrated 🫶✨