Original author(s) Operating system | Written in C | |
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Initial release July 2002; 14 years ago (2002-07) Stable release 2.2.27 / July 1, 2016; 8 months ago (2016-07-01) | ||
Dovecot is an open-source IMAP and POP3 server for Linux/UNIX-like 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 mailserver.
According to Openemailsurvey Dovecot has an installed base of more than 3 million email servers and a global market share of 68% of all IMAP servers. While Dovecot software can be used in commercial use without any license fees, a commercial version is also available as Dovecot Pro. The commercial version is provided by Dovecot Oy along with support and enterprise add-ons such as the object storage and full-text search plugins. Since March 2015, Dovecot Oy has been part of the Open-Xchange Family.
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 (called Local delivery agent in Dovecot’s documentation) and an LMTP server, with optional Sieve filtering support.
Dovecot supports a variety of authentication schemas for IMAP and POP 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.
Apple Inc. includes Dovecot for email services since Mac OS X Server 10.6 Snow Leopard.
In 2017, Mozilla, via the Mozilla Open Source Support program, conducted a security audit on the Dovecot software, the first public audit of the Dovecot code.