Well, I've really no idea. I know it works for many people and I couldn't get it to break when stress testing with hundreds of connections per second.
More info: In the 5 minutes between when Nagios flagged IMAP as down (and we tested it as down) until we restarted Dovecot, 103 authentications successfully completed. For the sake of reference, in the previous 5 minutes 311 IMAP logins succeeded. Also interesting: IMAP has died twice so far today (both times were at typical daily usage peaks). POP3 has not tested as down once. Admittedly, we do roughly 9 X as many IMAP logins as POP, but they both auth via dovecot-auth, right? -Ben
