On Mon, 2003-02-17 at 08:28, Andreas Aardal Hanssen wrote:

I wonder what the motives for the author of Dovecot IMAP was when he started his project.

Lack of securely written code in other servers, although Courier did prove to be quite secure after all.

I wouldn't want to comment on Dovecot's design, since I'm no fan of trolling.

I don't think commenting is trolling, as long as there's truth in it, or at least honest opinions.

The project clearly has different goals than Binc. Dovecot wants excellent features, indexing and an advanced security promoting design.

Implementation security as well. I'm not sure about features. It's more about trying to be fast and light. Indexes make Dovecot comparable to Cyrus in speed, but updating them isn't required so it's still drop-in replacement for UW imapd and Courier. Index files themselves aren't really required either, but there's no option currently to disable them.

It even recently included a POP server. What's the reasoning there?

Someone wanted it so it'd be easy to run both POP3 and IMAP servers without having to configure them twice. I don't see any harm in it anyway, it took only few hours to write, it's optional and doesn't take much space in sources.