Security is paramount for any email server, and it was at the forefront of the developers minds’ when they created Dovecot. But that’s not all this open-source IMAP and POP3 email server offers.
This is designed for Linux/UNIX-like systems, and it’s ideal for installations on both a big and small scale. Dovecot is quick, easy to configure, has no special demands for administration, and places little strain on memory.
Sounds good? Let’s take a closer look at Dovecot’s biggest advantages.
High performance
Dovecot is recognized as one of the top-performing IMAP servers available today, while it still offers support for standard Maildir and mbox formats. Mailboxes are indexed transparently, ensuring Dovecot provides a high standard of performance and offers complete compatibility with current mailbox handling tools.
Compliance with standards
Dovecot is compliant with key standards: v1.1 has passed all of the tests for standard compliance required of IMAP servers. That’s so notable because most of the alternatives available fail a lot of them.
The power of self-optimization
With Dovecot, its indexes are self-optimizing and contain what’s commonly required by the user’s client.
Healing for self-addressing problems
Dovecot is designed to self-heal: it attempts to resolve the majority of issues (e.g. index files which break) it detects independently. However, any problems noticed are logged, empowering administrators with the means to trace issues’ source of origin at a later point.
Designed to be admin-friendly
Dovecot has been built to offer a high level of admin-friendliness. As a result, common messages alerting users to errors are typically streamlined to be as easy to understand as possible. All crashes, despite their cause, will be classified as a bug to be fixed.
Compatibility with clustered file systems
With Dovecot, mailboxes and their respective indexes can be adjusted by numerous computers simultaneously — without hindering performance.
That means Dovecot functions impressively with clustered file systems. NES may have problems with caching, but users may be able to find a way around them thanks to director proxies.
Authentication is flexible
The user authentication afforded by Dovecot is highly flexible and rich with features. It’s capable of supporting a variety of authentication databases and key mechanisms.
Association with Postfix and Exim
Users of Postfix 2.3 plus or Exim 4.64 plus can run SMTP authentication directly against the Dovecot authentication backend, with no need for separate configuration.
Simple migration
With Dovecot, migration from most currently-available IMAP and POP3 servers is simple. That means the change is transparent to its existing user base.
Support for workarounds
With Dovecot, workarounds for a number of IMAP and POP3 client bugs are supported. You can activate only those you actually need, though, as they can lead to suboptimal protocol exchange.
High security
The design and implementation of Dovecot have a tight focus on security. It’s incredibly unlikely that anyone will be able to find a gap in Dovecot’s security, which should provide users with the peace of mind they need.
Easy extensibility
Another benefit of Dovecot is its easy extensibility. You can add plugins to introduce new commands, adjust current behaviors, inject your data into index files, and also add support for alternative mailbox formats. For example, both quota and ACL support can be introduced as plugins.
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