Linux lovers know that there are multiple packages available across the globe to install any service. IMAP (Internet Message Access Protocol) and POP3 (Post Office Protocol) servers are very common to setup on e-mail servers to access the messages using client software (Mozilla Thunderbird, Microsoft Outlook, Outlook express, etc) on any operating system like Linux, UNIX, Windows and Mac.
Dovecot is an open source IMAP and POP3 server for Linux/UNIX-like systems, written with security primarily in mind. Dovecot is an excellent choice for both small and large installations. It’s fast, simple to set up, requires no special administration and it uses very little memory.
Some of the most interesting features of Dovecot are given as under;
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Dovecot is among the highest performing IMAP servers while still supporting the standard mbox and Maildir formats.
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The mailboxes are transparently indexed, which gives Dovecot its good performance while still providing full compatibility with existing mailbox handling tools.
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Dovecot’s indexes are self-optimizing. They contain exactly what the user’s client commonly needs, no more and no less.
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Dovecot is self-healing. It tries to fix most of the problems it notices by itself, such as broken index files. The problems are however logged so the administrator can later try to figure out what caused them.
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Complete IMAP4rev1 and POP3 support. IPv6, SSL and TLS are supported.
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Supports multiple commonly used IMAP extensions, including SORT, THREAD and IDLE.
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Shared mailboxes are fully supported in v1.2+. Older versions also support admin-configurable ACL files.
