Dovecot
Dovecot is an IMAP server whose major goals are security and extreme reliability. It uses index files to optimally store the mailbox state, which makes it very fast even with huge mailboxes. Indexes won't prevent external mailbox updates, so Dovecot is still fully compatible with standard Maildir and mbox formats. There's also a fully featured POP3 server included.
| Tags | Communications Email Post-Office IMAP POP3 |
|---|---|
| Licenses | LGPL |
| Operating Systems | POSIX |
| Implementation | C |
Recent releases
- 07 Jun 2009 10:25
Changes: This new major version includes various major enhancements, bugfixes, and security fixes.
- 10 Mar 2008 03:04
Changes: A new security hole where users could log in without a valid password was fixed.
- 06 Mar 2008 01:24
Changes: Small fixes.
- 15 Jul 2007 14:58
Changes: Forwards compatibility with upcoming 1.1 and many small bugfixes.
- 15 Jun 2007 10:44
Changes: Many small bugs were fixed all around the code.
- All comments
Recent commentsRe: Reliability
I am assuming you are using procmail to
get your e-mail into Maildir/ folders.
Email is stored in mbox format, but thanks for the tip.
Re: Reliability
I am assuming you are using procmail to get your e-mail into Maildir/ folders. If so, this is probably where you are getting the corrupt indexes. If you have $HOME/Maildir/new in your .procmailrc file, change it to $HOME/Maildir/. The trailing '/' tells procmail to expect a Maildir format folder. This should eliminate the corrupt index alerts. Basically with your current configuration you are using MH style messages and not Maildir. `man procmailrc` for more information.
Thank you!
I have been using courier-imap for the past 3 years and I must say I have not been impressed with it. It is difficult to set up out of the box. This software package took me all of 5 minutes to compile, install and configure - and it WORKS! I love the extensive variety of configuration options. Thank you.
Re: Reliability
I run Dovecot on a usermode Linux instance with very little memory. Occasionally the system will run out of memory and kill Dovecot. It seems to handle this very well. I see error messages in the log about corrupt indexes, but it keeps on working.
Re: Reliability
Just clarifying: By reliability I especially mean the index files. Often programs that use binary database files don't allow any kind of problems in it, or it crashes. If they got corrupted, you have to run some special fsck to fix it, or even recreate it manually and maybe lose some information.
Dovecot trusts index files very little. It tries to check every possible error condition in them, if anything is found the error is logged and the indexes will be automatically rebuilt. Indexes don't contain any unique information so rebuilding them won't lose anything.
Also, if Dovecot can't use indexes for any reason (eg. quota full), it can work without them. Then it just builds the them in memory.