Dovecot

An IMAP and POP3 server for Linux/Unix.

Dovecot serves IMAP and POP3 mailboxes from local storage, using the Maildir format, mbox, or its own dbox / mdbox formats. It is designed for performance — Dovecot can serve mail to thousands of users from a single instance — and for security: the codebase has had unusually few security vulnerabilities relative to its scale.

Dovecot pairs commonly with Postfix in self-hosted mail-server setups: Postfix accepts SMTP and writes incoming mail to Maildir folders that Dovecot then serves to mail clients. Sieve filtering rules, fetchmail-style retrieval from external accounts, and mail searching via the FTS plugin are all supported.

Timo Sirainen wrote Dovecot starting in 2002 and led its development for many years. Open-Xchange now sponsors much of the development. The codebase is dual-licensed under LGPL-2.1 and the MIT licence, which gives commercial users some flexibility when integrating Dovecot into their products.

License: LGPL-2.1-only OR MIT (dual)

Category: Networking

Website: https://www.dovecot.org/

Install

Debian/Ubuntu: sudo apt install dovecot-imapd dovecot-pop3d
Fedora/RHEL:   sudo dnf install dovecot
Arch:          sudo pacman -S dovecot

Authors

Timo Sirainen (creator)
Open-Xchange

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