Providers running dovecot?

[Olivier Cailloux]

Le jeudi 08 octobre 2020 à 21:41 +0200, Marc Roos a écrit :
> There is no such thing as free. If you do not pay anything, you know 
> you are the product. 

I do not wish to debate here about whether anything is really free in
this world and what this would mean exactly, but I expect people
understand what I mean in this context when I refer to a “free e-mail
account”. Similarly, if you mean that it is a bad idea on my part to
suggest to my users to open a free e-mail account, well, you may be
right, but I currently don’t think so, and what I know for sure is that
this is a long and complicated debate that I’d rather not have here and
now.

>  >for an e-mail address just to use my software, so I’d recommend
> only 
> a
>  >provider who gives starter plans for free. (Of course these users
> in
>  >turn would perhaps then upgrade their plan if they want to.)
> 
> I don't think providers would be very willing (understatement) to 
> install
> your software on their platform that services their other clients. 
> I assume this is server side, since you enquire about dovecot.

My software acts as an IMAP client. I do not expect providers to
install anything for me, I just want to find a provider that uses
dovecot and offers e-mail accounts for free. For example, one answer to
my question would be: “GMail offers e-mail accounts for free and uses
dovecot”. (This would not be true, as GMail does not use dovecot, but
if the statement would be true, it would correctly answer my question.)
I would then be able to recommend my users to open an e-mail account at
GMail, if they do not have one already, and they would then be able to
use my software with their GMail account.

> 
>  >So far I didn’t find a service provider providing free e-mail 
> accounts
>  >(similar to GMail, Yahoo, …) and using Dovecot, which I find very
>  >surprising, as I thought some of these big names, or at least some
>  >smaller ones that I do not know, would use Dovecot.
>  >
> 
> T-mobile uses dovecot, find t-mobile users ;)

My question is really: are there providers out there that satisfy these
two conditions:
a) offer free e-mail accounts (similar to Yahoo, GMail, and so on)
b) use dovecot as their IMAP software.

Also, information that would point to a non-existence result would be
of interest. For example, an article that indicates which softwares the
main providers (that offer e-mail accounts for free) use.

The real, “final” question I am interested in is, but which might be
slightly off-topic on this list (the reason I asked the other
question), is to find providers that satisfy these two conditions:
a) offer free e-mail accounts
b) implement correctly the IMAP SEARCH feature of RFC 3501.

That is because my client uses the IMAP SEARCH feature, and it is
usually implemented incorrectly (e.g. in GMail or MS Exchange).
-- 
Olivier