Description:

Dovecot is an IMAP and POP3 server for Linux/UNIX-like systems,
written with security primarily in mind. Although it's written with C,
it uses several coding techniques to avoid most of the common
pitfalls.

Dovecot can work with standard mbox and maildir formats and it's fully
compatible with UW-IMAP and Courier IMAP servers as well as mail
clients accessing the mailboxes directly. It's also planned to support
storing mails in SQL databases.

Dovecot is easy to set up and doesn't require special maintenance.
Only thing you need is to get the authentication working properly - if
your users are in /etc/passwd there's hardly anything you have to do.

Dovecot should be pretty fast, mostly because of index files that
Dovecot maintains; instead of having to scan through all the data in
mailbox, Dovecot can get most of the wanted information from index
with little effort.

Status:
- should be quite ready for use with normal IMAP clients
- complete IMAP4rev1 and POP3 support
- supports THREAD, SORT and IDLE extensions, required by many IMAP
webmails
- complete TLS/SSL support
- IPv6 ready
- shared mailboxes aren't yet supported
- Maildir++ quota is supported, bad hard filesystem quota can be
problematic