Dovecot is an open-sourceIMAP and POP3server for Unix-likeoperating systems, 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 server. The primary purpose of Dovecot is to act as mail storage server. Mail is delivered to the server using some mail delivery agent and stored for later access with an email client. Dovecot can also act as mail proxy server, 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 the , 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 and Courier IMAP servers’ implementation of them, as well as mail clients accessing the mailboxes directly. Dovecot also includes a mail delivery agent and an LMTP server, with optional Sieve filtering support. Dovecot supports a variety of authentication schemas for IMAP, POP and message submission agent 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 email services since Mac OS X Server 10.6 Snow Leopard. In 2017, Mozilla, via the Mozilla Open SourceSupport program, conducted a security audit on the Dovecot software, the first public audit of the Dovecot code.
