Dovecot Fatal Error on Some cPanel Servers

While progress has been made, the issue is not yet fully resolved on all affected servers.

Our engineering team has identified the underlying cause as a hardlink tied to a legacy EL7 hard-coded repository, most commonly present on servers that were upgraded from EL7 to AlmaLinux 8.

The team is actively validating a scalable, long-term fix to address this behavior consistently across impacted systems. In the meantime, we are continuing targeted remediation where needed and closely monitoring results.

Further updates will be shared as progress continues.

Our team is actively working on automating remediation steps related to the AlmaLinux 8 repository configuration associated with Issue #1 (servers upgraded in-place from CentOS 7 to AlmaLinux 8 using the cPanel Elevate process). This effort is intended to ensure consistent configuration for that group.

Regarding Issue #2, our investigation indicates this scenario affects a much smaller subset of clients, primarily servers where dovecot-solr was installed prior to the cPanel v132 release. At this time, we are not seeing widespread impact related to this condition.

If you believe your server may be affected by either issue, or if you are experiencing email-related disruptions such as IMAP/POP3 connectivity problems or Dovecot reporting as down, please contact our support team by opening a ticket or starting a live chat so we can review and address the issue on your server.

We are currently investigating an issue where a recent cPanel update is causing the Dovecot service to crash and fail to properly restart on a specific subset of servers.

This service interruption can result in connectivity problems with IMAP and POP3 and may affect mail sending from the server.

Not all cPanel servers are impacted. We have identified that the issue primarily affects servers that meet one of the following criteria:


1. Servers that have performed an in-place OS upgrade from CentOS 7 to AlmaLinux 8 using the cPanel Elevate script.
https://support.cpanel.net/hc/en-us/articles/36882183127959-Socket-file-usr-local-cpanel-var-cpdoveauth-domainownerd-sock-incorrectly-set-in-etc-dovecot-dovecot-conf


2. Servers running AlmaLinux 8 and cPanel that had the dovecot-solr service installed prior to the cPanel version 132 release.
https://support.cpanel.net/hc/en-us/articles/36830044341655-Dovecot-not-starting-when-dovecot-solr-is-installed-cPanel-version-132

cPanel has released documentation and provided remediation steps for these issues.

If you are currently experiencing issues with Dovecot reporting down, please open a support ticket via our help center portal or open a chat with our support team so our team can address the issue on your server.