cPanel Admin Tips & Hints

See who’s logged into your Dovecot mail server at any time with this easy fix

In WHM, if you go to System Health -> Process Manager or System Health -> Show Current Running Processes, you can easily see how many instances of POP3 or IMAP are being used at any given time (i.e., how many users are actively logged in to your mail server).  Wouldn’t it be great, though, to be able to see WHO is actually logged in to each process, instead of just knowing how many logged in users there are?

It turns out this is pretty easy to enable:

REQUIRES: Dovecot must installed as your IMAP/POP3 server
DIFFICULTY: Easy
ROOT REQUIRED: Yes
TIME REQUIRED: 5 Minutes
DANGER LEVEL: Low

1. Log in as root through SSH

2. Open up cPanel’s dovecot datastore:
nano /var/cpanel/conf/dovecot/main

3. Add this line at the very bottom of the file, and then save and close the file:
verbose_proctitle: yes

4. Run the following command to make cPanel rebuild its dovecot configuration file:
/scripts/builddovecotconf

5. Now, just restart Dovecot to push this change through:
service dovecot restart

That’s all there is to it!  Now, when you look at running processes, you’ll not only see how many IMAP or POP3 processes are running and under which cPanel account, but you’ll also see who the currently logged in user is (username@domain.com) and the IP address that they are logged in from.  Pretty useful!

If you know of other Dovecot tips or tricks or if you have another way to implement this trick, please let us know in the comments!

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3 Responses to See who’s logged into your Dovecot mail server at any time with this easy fix

  1. ATUL KHACHANE says:

    Excellent buddy

  2. Sergio says:

    In cPanel 11.36.1 there is no /var/cpanel/conf/dovecot/main directory, Is there another location for this file?

    • John says:

      You are correct…but there was also no /main directory in previous versions. The word “main” is the file name. In the post, I instruct you to use the command

      nano /var/cpanel/conf/dovecot/main

      …doing so would open the file “main” in the “dovecot” directory. Just to be sure, I tested it on one of my servers, all of which are running 11.36.1, and the command still works as expected.

      Hope that helps!

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