DOVECOT

The Secure IMAP server

Dovecot is an excellent choice for both small and large installations; however, for larger installations we recommend our commercial solution Dovecot Pro.

Dovecot Pro

Meet The World’s Leading Email Backend Platform

Dovecot Pro is a full-service email platform that delivers dynamic scalability, high performance, efficient utilization of hardware, and outstanding support to the world’s largest Telcos, ISP’s, and Hosters.

News

Features

Best performing

Dovecot is among the best performing IMAP servers while still supporting the standard mbox and Maildir formats. The mailboxes are transparently indexed, which gives Dovecot its good performance while still providing full compatibility with existing mailbox handling tools.

Flexible authentication

Dovecot’s user authentication is extremely flexible and feature-rich, supporting many different authentication databases and mechanisms.

Standards compliant

Dovecot is standards compliant. Dovecot passes all IMAP server standard compliancy tests while most other servers fail many of them.

Postfix and Exim

Postfix 2.3+ and Exim 4.64+ users can do SMTP authentication directly against Dovecot’s authentication backend without having to configure it separately. You can also use our submission service to perform authentication before relaying mail to your MTA.

Self-optimizing

Dovecot’s indexes are self-optimizing. They contain exactly what the user’s client commonly needs, no more and no less.

Easy migration

Dovecot supports easy migration from many existing IMAP and POP3 servers, allowing the change to be transparent to existing users.

Self-healing

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.

Workarounds support

Dovecot supports workarounds for several bugs in IMAP and POP3 clients. Since the workarounds may cause the protocol exchange to be sub-optimal, you can enable only the workarounds you need.

Admin-friendly

Dovecot tries to be admin-friendly. Common error messages are made as easily understandable as possible. Any crash, no matter how it happened, is considered a bug that will be fixed.

Security

Dovecot’s design and implementation is highly focused on security. You can report any security vulnerabilities via our YesWeHack program or via email to security@dovecot.org.

Clustered filesystems compatibility

Dovecot allows mailboxes and their indexes to be modified by multiple computers at the same time, while still performing well. This means that Dovecot works well with clustered filesystems. NFS has caching problems, but you can work around them with director proxies.

Easily Extensible

Dovecot is easily extensible. Plugins can add new commands, modify existing behavior, add their own data into index files or even add support for new mailbox formats. For example quota and ACL support are completely implemented as plugins.