I went away for a few weeks and when I came back to play with my FreeBSD server, Dovecot would not start. It kept giving errors about protocol not supported. No log info available, and I was pretty clueless. I don't know why it stopped working, the only change was the VMpro update. Here's what I did to get it running again:

used portupgrade -R dovecot to update the installed version of dovecot.

That cleared the error, but the protocols still rejected connections. I added these lines to the dovecot config file after the "protocol pop3 {" line:

listen = *:110
ssl_listen = *:995


POP3 and POP3s now work. I suspect doing the same for imap with the proper ports will take care of that, but I don't need an imap server right now.

Hope this helps someone else.

Steve