Hazel's Zone

I was trying to figure out why my sieve filters weren't being enabled from the mail client I use, KMail, which has managesieve protocol support. The Dovecot documentation has a troubleshooting section for managesieve here, but it isn't really clear. There is a small suggestion that "you can use Dovecot's rawlog facility" to help debug managesieve, but no instructions were given. I managed to get it working by doing the following. First in my 20-managesieve.conf I put the following:

protocols = $protocols sieve

service managesieve-login {
  inet_listener sieve {
    port = 4190
  }
}

service managesieve {
  executable = managesieve postlogin
  process_limit = 1024
}

protocol sieve {
}

service postlogin {
  executable = script-login -d rawlog
  unix_listener postlogin {
  }
}

Specifically, the line with executable = and the service postlogin block are important, unless service postlogin is defined somewhere else in your config.

Second, you have to make a dovecot.rawlog directory in the users home directory for every user you want to enable the rawlog for. The raw logs will appear in this directory like, ~/dovecot.rawlog/20190512-171623-25459.in and ~/dovecot.rawlog/20190512-171623-25459.out for each connection. However they won't appear if the directory doesn't already exist. They only include a protocol trace from after the user logs in.