Talk:Block SMTP Authentication Attacks With Fail2Ban

configure fail2ban to startup on boot

chkconfig --add fail2ban
# chkconfig fail2ban on

Informative sources

Protecting your server from attacks with fail2ban

• tips for setting up fail2ban for apache, dovecot, etc

Blocking brute force attacks to Dovecot on CentOS

• has clear regex example. wrongly suggests directly editing jail.conf