MBF Knowledge Base

I'm trying to launch dovecot with /etc/init.d/dovecot start, but I receive the following error messages:

Starting Dovecot Imap: Error: service(pop3-login): listen(*, 110) failed: Address already in use

Error: service(pop3-login): listen(*, 995) failed: Address already in use

Error: service(imap-login): listen(*, 143) failed: Address already in use

Error: service(imap-login): listen(*, 993) failed: Address already in use

Fatal: Failed to start listeners

How do I fix this?

The problem is that something is already listening on these ports.

The following command will show you what's listening:

$ sudo netstat -lnp | grep 993

You will see a result similar to this:

tcp        0      0 0.0.0.0:993             0.0.0.0:*               LISTEN      2771/couriertcpd

The last column gives you the PID and name of the process bound to that particular port.

To unbind the process in this particular example, you would need to run the following command:

yum remove psa-courier-imap