Dovecot

Original author(s)	Timo Sirainen
Developer(s)	Timo Sirainen and contributors
Initial release	July 2002)
Stable release	2.2.1[1] resp. 2.1.16[2] / April 19, 2013) resp. April 5, 2013)
Operating system	UNIX-like
Type	POP3 and IMAP server
License	Mostly MIT and LGPLv2[3]
Website	www.dovecot.org

Dovecot is an open source IMAP and POP3 server for Linux/UNIX-like systems, written primarily with security in mind. Developed by Timo Sirainen, Dovecot was first released in July 2002. Dovecot primarily aims to be a lightweight, fast and easy to set up open source mailserver.

Features

Dovecot can work with standard mbox, Maildir, and its own native high-performance dbox formats.^[4] It is fully compatible with UW IMAP and Courier IMAP servers’ implementation of them, as well as mail clients accessing the mailboxes directly.

Dovecot also includes a Mail delivery agent (called Local delivery agent in Dovecot’s documentation), with optional Sieve filtering support.

Dovecot supports a variety of authentication schemas for IMAP and POP access including CRAM-MD5 and the more secure DIGEST-MD5.

With version 2.2 some new features have been added to Dovecot, e.g. additional IMAP command extensions, dsync has been rewritten / optimized and shared mailboxes now support per-user flags.^[5]

Apple Inc. includes Dovecot for email services in Mac OS X Server 10.6 Snow Leopard.

Security

Dovecot's author takes pride in secure design and implementation. A reward of EUR 1,000 (approximately $1,310 USD, £840 GBP, 130000 Yen as of May 2013) has been announced for finding any remotely exploitable security flaw.^[6]

See also

Free software portal

• Comparison of mail servers

References

External links

• Official site
• Official Wiki with how-tos and documentation
• "Dovecot + Sendmail = Perfect Mail Server". bobcares.com. 2008-01-12. Retrieved 2013-05-06.