dovecot

[william_holt at speakeasy.net (Bill Holt)]

Hello, I remember someone here recommending dovecot, so I hope to catch that person's eye. Everywhere I google I find how 'easy' dovecot is to install. True, but how to get it to work?
Evidence says it starts up (/var/log/messages), however can't find it (ps -aux | grep imap), if I sart it manually (/usr/local/libexec/dovecot/imap) it appears in (ps -aux | grep imap) but neither method shows the demon at port 143 (netstat -tan), also if I can't kill the manual process (kill [pid}). Any pointers would be great, thanks a million you guys are always on point.
I temporarily stopped iptables, and  if it matters I'm running redhat ES 4.0