Dovecot is an open-source

IMAP In computing, the Internet Message Access Protocol (IMAP) is an Internet standard protocol used by email clients to retrieve email messages from a mail server over a TCP/IP connection. IMAP is defined by . IMAP was designed with the goal of per ...

and

POP3 In computing, the Post Office Protocol (POP) is an application-layer Internet standard protocol used by e-mail clients to retrieve e-mail from a mail server. POP version 3 (POP3) is the version in common use, and along with IMAP the most common ...

server for

Unix-like A Unix-like (sometimes referred to as UN*X or *nix) operating system is one that behaves in a manner similar to a Unix system, although not necessarily conforming to or being certified to any version of the Single UNIX Specification. A Unix-li ...

operating system An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware, software resources, and provides common services for computer programs. Time-sharing operating systems schedule tasks for efficient use of the system and may also i ...

s, written primarily with security in mind. Timo Sirainen originated Dovecot and first released it in July 2002. Dovecot developers primarily aim to produce a lightweight, fast and easy-to-set-up open-source

email Electronic mail (email or e-mail) is a method of exchanging messages ("mail") between people using electronic devices. Email was thus conceived as the electronic ( digital) version of, or counterpart to, mail, at a time when "mail" mean ...

server Server may refer to: Computing *Server (computing), a computer program or a device that provides functionality for other programs or devices, called clients Role * Waiting staff, those who work at a restaurant or a bar attending customers and su ...

. The primary purpose of Dovecot is to act as mail storage server. Mail is delivered to the server using some

mail delivery agent A message delivery agent (MDA), or mail delivery agent, is a computer software component that is responsible for the delivery of e-mail messages to a local recipient's mailbox., ''Internet Mail Architecture'', D. Crocker (July 2009) It is also call ...

(MDA) and stored for later access with an

email client An email client, email reader or, more formally, message user agent (MUA) or mail user agent is a computer program used to access and manage a user's email. A web application which provides message management, composition, and reception functio ...

(mail user agent, or MUA). Dovecot can also act as mail

proxy server In computer networking, a proxy server is a server application that acts as an intermediary between a client requesting a resource and the server providing that resource. Instead of connecting directly to a server that can fulfill a reques ...

, forwarding connection to another mail server, or act as a lightweight MUA in order to retrieve and manipulate mail on remote server for e.g. mail migration. According to th
Open Email Survey
as of 2020, Dovecot has an installed base of at least 2.9million IMAP servers, and has a global market share of 76.9% of all IMAP servers. The results of the same survey in 2019 gave figures of 2.6million and 76.2%, respectively.

Features

Dovecot can work with standard

mbox Mbox is a generic term for a family of related file formats used for holding collections of email messages. It was first implemented in Fifth Edition Unix. All messages in an mbox mailbox are concatenated and stored as plain text in a single f ...

Maildir The Maildir e-mail format is a common way of storing email messages in which each message is stored in a separate file with a unique name, and each mail folder is a file system directory. The local file system handles file locking as messages are ...

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

UW IMAP The UW IMAP server was the reference server implementation of the Internet Message Access Protocol. It was developed at the University of Washington by Mark Crispin and others. History UW-IMAP's development began c.1988. As of 2003, UW IMAP ...

and Courier IMAP servers’ implementation of them, as well as mail clients accessing the mailboxes directly. Dovecot also includes a mail delivery agent (called ''Local delivery agent'' in Dovecot's documentation) and an

LMTP The Local Mail Transfer Protocol (LMTP) is an alternative to (Extended) Simple Mail Transfer Protocol for situations where the receiving side does not have a mail queue, such as a message transfer agent acting as a message delivery agent. LMTP was ...

server, with optional

Sieve A sieve, fine mesh strainer, or sift, is a device for separating wanted elements from unwanted material or for controlling the particle size distribution of a sample, using a screen such as a woven mesh or net or perforated sheet materia ...

filtering support. Dovecot supports a variety of authentication schemas for

, POP and

message submission agent A message submission agent (MSA), or mail submission agent, is a computer program or software agent that receives electronic mail messages from a mail user agent (MUA) and cooperates with a mail transfer agent (MTA) for delivery of the mail. It use ...

(MSA) access, including

CRAM-MD5 In cryptography, CRAM-MD5 is a challenge–response authentication mechanism (CRAM) based on the HMAC-MD5 algorithm. As one of the mechanisms supported by the Simple Authentication and Security Layer (SASL), it is often used in email software as pa ...

and the more secure DIGEST-MD5. With version 2.2, some new features have been added to Dovecot, e.g. additional IMAP command extensions, dsync has been rewritten or optimized, and shared mailboxes now support per-user flags. Version 2.3 adds a

, Lua scripting for authentication, and some other improvements.

Apple Inc. Apple Inc. is an American multinational technology company headquartered in Cupertino, California, United States. Apple is the largest technology company by revenue (totaling in 2021) and, as of June 2022, is the world's biggest company ...

includes Dovecot for

services since Mac OS X Server 10.6 Snow Leopard. In 2017,

Mozilla Mozilla (stylized as moz://a) is a free software community founded in 1998 by members of Netscape. The Mozilla community uses, develops, spreads and supports Mozilla products, thereby promoting exclusively free software and open standards, w ...

, via the Mozilla Open Source Support program, conducted a security audit on the Dovecot software, the first public audit of the Dovecot code.

References

External links

* {{official website
Official wiki
with how-tos and documentation Free email server software Free software programmed in C Email server software for Linux Software using the MIT license Software developed in Finland

Features

See also

References

External links