Timo, thanks for writing and releasing Dovecot. I've recently discovered it and have been very impressed at the speed and balance between flexibility and simplicity.
I had to make a packet-trace to be sure that encryption with OpenSSL was working correctly, since it all 'just worked' first time without complex configuration, which I don't think I've ever seen before ;-) LDAP too was quite straightforward (after I worked out where my virtual-domain schema differed from what was required).
One small glitch I have noticed is that when the client requests a list of messages sorted by date, the timezone is ignored.
For example, listed in descending order:
07/07/2003 00:01 +0300 (= 21:01 UT) 06/07/2003 23:15 +0100 (= 22:15 UT) 06/07/2003 19:03 +0100 (= 18:03 UT)
I think that this should instead be...
06/07/2003 23:15 +0100 (= 22:15 UT) 07/07/2003 00:01 +0300 (= 21:01 UT) 06/07/2003 19:03 +0100 (= 18:03 UT)
It's most noticable when the client (Mulberry in my case) is configured to display all times in the local timezone. (Mulberry has recently added custom flags which work perfectly with Dovecot - I was hoping this would be the case, and was one of the reasons I was looking for something to replace the version of Courier I previously had installed). Mulberry does like to have NAMESPACE otherwise it usually asks for folder locations on connecting, btw. No real problem, though.
A little tip: if anyone is interested in having their MDA write Maildir with CR+LF so that sendfile(2) can be used on all messages (not just those created by Dovecot), Exim offers this natively by adding the "use_crlf" option to the appendfile transport which seems to work fine with 0.99.10 (though not 0.99.9.1, maybe because of 2003-06-04 17:39 in Changelog).
It seems Dovecot is using the ,W= Maildir tag for some type of size instead of ,S= but I haven't traced far enough to work out what exactly W/virtual_size means, am I right in guessing that it might be 'wire size' i.e. message-size-with-CRLF-line-endings? (If so, use_crlf in exim.conf can be augmented with "maildir_tag = ,W=$message_size" to help keep overheads to a minimum).
And, one final question: for a dual-stack machine to listen on both IPv6 and IPv4 sockets, is the currently preferred option simply to start two instances of Dovecot with their own dovecot.conf containing different *_listen parameters?
--Stu