Is there any reason for Dovecot to be logging to mail.log?

[myfirstnameispaul]

Whenever I'm hunting through mail.log I find I'm wading through endless dovecot messages that clutter up mail.log. I see in jails.conf that dovecot has it's own configuration:

mailinabox/conf/fail2ban/jails.conf

Lines 10 to 15 in f0e7b46

	[dovecot]
	enabled = true
	filter = dovecotimap
	logpath = /var/log/mail.log
	findtime = 30
	maxretry = 20

Any particular reason to require dovecot to log to mail.log, instead of something like dovecot.log?

[downtownallday]

FWIW, I prefer to keep postfix and dovecot logs in one file (mail.log) but also to duplicate errors to mail.err. What I don't like is how the default rsyslog configuration duplicates to syslog, so I have turned that off by adding the file 20-mailinabox.conf to /etc/rsyslog.d with the following:

# Output mail-related messages to mail.log, then prevent rsyslog's
# default configuration from duplicating the messages to syslog.

mail.*				-/var/log/mail.log
mail.err			/var/log/mail.err
mail.*              stop

I think the jails configuration specifies what log file is monitored by fail2ban.

[myfirstnameispaul]

I think the jails configuration specifies what log file is monitored by fail2ban.

I included that because it was the only thing I could think of that might impact where the log is located.

The problem I find is the sheer volume of various imap... lines, and at least for me over the past nearly 15 years of administrating small mail servers, I've never had any use for those kinds or messages, but I don't know the experience of others.