These three services are helper processes for dovecot, as can be seen in the output of systemctl status: ├─rvice Jul 13 11:21:46 dovecot: master: Error: service(log): child 1210 killed with signal 9 Jul 13 11:21:46 dovecot: master: Error: service(ssl-params): Initial status notification not received in 30 seconds, killing the process Jul 13 11:21:46 dovecot: master: Error: service(log): Initial status notification not received in 30 seconds, killing the process So what was the problem? The clue is in these log messages, which occurred about a minute after the system’s boot (it’s a VPS virtual machine): Jul 13 11:21:46 dovecot: master: Error: service(anvil): Initial status notification not received in 30 seconds, killing the process This was exceptionally nasty, because mails stopped arriving silently. Restarting dovecot got it back running properly again, and I got a flood of the mails that were pending on the server. But there was no such.Ĭhecking up the server’s logs, there were tons of these messages: dovecot: master: Warning: service(pop3-login): process_limit (100) reached, client connections are being dropped As I’m using fetchmail to get mail from my own server running dovecot v2.2.13, I’m used to getting notifications when fetchmail is unhappy. When dovecot silently stops to deliver mailsĪfter a few days being happy with not getting spam, I started to suspect that something is completely wrong with receiving mail.