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Overview
Dovecot is an open source
IMAP and
POP3 email server
for Linux/UNIX-like systems, written with security primarily in mind.
Dovecot is an excellent choice for both small and large installations. It's
fast, simple to set up, requires no special administration and it uses very
little memory.
Some of the most notable features of Dovecot include:
- Dovecot is among the highest performing IMAP servers
while still supporting the standard
mbox and
Maildir
formats. The mailboxes are transparently indexed, which gives Dovecot its
good performance while still providing full compatibility with existing
mailbox handling tools.
- Dovecot is standards compliant. Dovecot v1.1 passes
all IMAP server
standard compliancy tests while most other servers fail many of
them.
- Dovecot's indexes are self-optimizing. They contain
exactly what the user's client commonly needs, no more and no less.
- Dovecot is self-healing. It tries to fix most of the
problems it notices by itself, such as broken index files. The problems are
however logged so the administrator can later try to figure out what caused
them.
- Dovecot tries to be admin-friendly. Common error
messages are made as easily understandable as possible. Any crash, no
matter how it happened, is considered a bug that will be fixed.
- Dovecot allows mailboxes and their indexes to be modified by multiple
computers at the same time, while still performing well. This means that
Dovecot works well with clustered filesystems.
NFS has caching problems,
but you can work around them with
director proxies.
- Dovecot's user authentication is extremely flexible and feature-rich,
supporting many different
authentication
databases and
mechanisms.
- Postfix 2.3+ and
Exim 4.64+ users can do SMTP
authentication directly against Dovecot's authentication backend without
having to configure it separately.
- Dovecot supports easy
migration from many existing
IMAP and POP3 servers, allowing the change to be transparent to
existing users.
- Dovecot supports workarounds
for several bugs in IMAP and POP3 clients. Since the workarounds may cause
the protocol exchange to be suboptimal, you can enable only the
workarounds you need.
- Dovecot's design
and implementation is highly focused on
security. Rather than taking the traditional road of just fixing
vulnerabilities whenever someone happens to report them,
I offer 1000 EUR of my own money to the first
person to find a security hole from Dovecot.
- Dovecot is easily extensible.
Plugins can add new commands,
modify existing behavior, add their own data into index files or even add
support for new mailbox formats. For example
quota and
ACL support are completely
implemented as plugins.
Status
- Complete IMAP4rev1 and POP3 support. IPv6, SSL and TLS are supported.
- Supports multiple commonly used IMAP extensions, including SORT,
THREAD and IDLE.
- Shared mailboxes are fully supported in v1.2+. Older versions also
support admin-configurable
ACL files.
- Maildir++ quota is
supported, but hard
filesystem quota can be problematic.
- Dovecot is commonly used with Linux, Solaris, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD
and Mac OS X. See the
Wiki page about OS compatibility for more.
Contact info
- Please use the Dovecot mailing list for
questions about Dovecot. You don't have to subscribe to it.
- Primary author: Timo Sirainen,
tss@iki.fi. (Sorry, I don't have time anymore to
answer Dovecot questions privately. If you send me a mail, there's a good chance
you won't get any answer.)
- Commercial support from
Dovecot Oy and
others.
Credits
The following companies have helped Dovecot:
- dovecot.org mirrors are hosted by
mpoli
and EasyISP.
- PT.COM / SAPO has sponsored the
development of many new features and performance improvements.
- Rackspace Email Hosting has sponsored the
development of many new features and performance improvements.
- Directi has sponsored the
development of many new features and performance improvements.
There have been many code contributions from other
individuals also.