Fail2ban does not work with Dovecot

Symptoms

The installed fail2ban rules do not work with Dovecot.

An error is displayed in the Dovecot log: «Failed during configuration: Have not found any log file for dovecot jail».

Causes

The Dovecot log is not allocated to a separate file.

Solution

By default, the Dovecot mail server log is written to the system log, so it's necessary to create a file for the log and specify the path to it in the log_path directive in the configuration file at /etc/dovecot/conf.d/10-logging.conf.

After that, restart the services using the following command:

systemctl restart dovecot