Dovecot is an

open-source Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open-source model is a decentralized sof ...

IMAP and POP3 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 daemon (computing), services for computer programs. Time-sharing operating systems scheduler (computing), schedule tasks for ef ...

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

, 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, Maildir, 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 IMA ...

and

Courier IMAP The Courier Mail Server is a mail transfer agent (MTA) server that provides SMTP, IMAP, POP3, SMAP, webmail, and mailing list services with individual components. It is best known for its IMAP server component. Courier can function as an inte ...

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 server, with optional

Sieve A sieve, fine mesh strainer, or sift, is a device for separation process, separating wanted elements from unwanted material or for controlling the particle size distribution of a sample, using a screen such as a warp and weft, woven mesh or n ...

filtering support. Dovecot supports a variety of authentication schemas for IMAP,

POP Pop or POP may refer to: Arts, entertainment, and media Music * Pop music, a musical genre Artists * POP, a Japanese idol group now known as Gang Parade * Pop!, a UK pop group * Pop! featuring Angie Hart, an Australian band Albums * ''Pop'' (G ...

and message submission agent (MSA) access, including CRAM-MD5 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 message submission agent, Lua scripting for authentication, and some other improvements. Apple Inc. 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