Dovecot is an open source

Open source

The term open source describes practices in production and development that promote access to the end product's source materials. Some consider open source a philosophy, others consider it a pragmatic methodology...

 IMAP and POP3 server for Linux

Linux

Linux is a Unix-like computer operating system assembled under the model of free and open source software development and distribution. The defining component of any Linux system is the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released October 5, 1991 by Linus Torvalds...

/UNIX-like

Unix-like

A Unix-like operating system is one that behaves in a manner similar to a Unix system, while not necessarily conforming to or being certified to any version of the Single UNIX Specification....

 systems, written primarily with security in mind

Secure by design

Secure by design, in software engineering, means that the software has been designed from the ground up to be secure. Malicious practices are taken for granted and care is taken to minimize impact when a security vulnerability is discovered or on invalid user input.Generally, designs that work well...

. Developed by Timo Sirainen

Timo Sirainen

Timo Sirainen, born 1979, is a Finnish programmer also known under the handles "cras" and "tss". Sirainen is the original author of the IRC-client Irssi and the POP/IMAP server Dovecot...

, 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

Mbox

mbox is a generic term for a family of related file formats used for holding collections of electronic mail messages. All messages in an mbox mailbox are concatenated and stored as plain text in a single file...

, Maildir

Maildir

The Maildir e-mail format is a common way of storing e-mail messages, where each message is kept in a separate file with a unique name, and each folder is a directory...

, and its own experimental native high-performance dbox formats. It is fully compatible with UW IMAP

UW IMAP

The UW IMAP server is the reference server implementation of the IMAP protocol. Unlike other server implementations, it is designed to be aggressively compatible with existing legacy mail stores and systems, and to be "plug-and-play" installable without requiring any site-specific configuration.UW...

 and Courier IMAP servers’ implementation of them, as well as mail clients accessing the mailboxes directly.

Dovecot also includes a Mail delivery agent

Mail delivery agent

A mail delivery agent or message delivery agent is a computer software component that is responsible for the delivery of e-mail messages to a local recipient's mailbox...

 (called Local delivery agent in Dovecot’s documentation), with optional Sieve

Sieve (mail filtering language)

Sieve is a programming language that can be used to create filters for email. It owes its creation to the CMU Cyrus Project, creators of Cyrus IMAP server....

 filtering support.

Dovecot supports a variety of authentication schemas for IMAP and POP

Post Office Protocol

In computing, the Post Office Protocol is an application-layer Internet standard protocol used by local e-mail clients to retrieve e-mail from a remote server over a TCP/IP connection. POP and IMAP are the two most prevalent Internet standard protocols for e-mail retrieval. Virtually all modern...

 access including CRAM-MD5

CRAM-MD5

In cryptography, CRAM-MD5 is achallenge-response authentication mechanism defined in RFC 2195 based on theHMAC-MD5 MACalgorithm...

 and the more secure DIGEST-MD5.

Apple Inc. includes Dovecot for email

Email

Electronic mail, commonly known as email or e-mail, is a method of exchanging digital messages from an author to one or more recipients. Modern email operates across the Internet or other computer networks. Some early email systems required that the author and the recipient both be online at the...

 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 $1,427 USD, £882 GBP as of June 2011) has been announced for finding any remotely exploitable security flaw.

External links

• Official site
• Official Wiki with how-tos and documentation