How do I get Dovecot to start when the address is already in use?

Posted by Sean on July 31, 2010

Fatal: listen(0.0.0.0, 993) failed: Address already in use

If you're receiving this error, you need to find the PID for dovecot and stop it:

lsof -i:993

Once you have the PID, you can issue the kill command to stop the process, and then start it again manually.

kill -9 <PID>

service dovecot start