Dovecot is an open-source IMAP server that quite frankly kicks ass.  I put it’s quality right up there with Postfix, the undisputed champion of SMTP servers.  Last year when upgrading from Courier-IMAP, we chose to go with Dovecot instead Cyrus (another very good open-source IMAP program) because of the direction that the project was heading.  Dovecot was being actively developed by a very smart individual named Timo Sirainen, with a goal of making it rock solid and secure.  And like most of the software that we use, we knew we’d be adding custom patches to it – so we also liked Dovecot because the C code is clean and easy to follow.

Over the past year Timo has worked extremely hard to find and fix all cases that can cause crashes, index corruption, security holes and other nastiness; as well as to make it as fast as possible without huge code rewrites.  Even when begged to do so by folks on the mailing list, Timo refused to release version 1.0 until he was satisfied that there were zero bugs.  Since August 2005, the pre-1.0 software has gone through 5 alpha releases, 9 beta releases, and 32 release candidates.  In recent weeks the bug-list has been empty, and only minor issues have been reported and immediately fixed.

And so the day has come…

On Fri, April 13, 2007 8:04 am, Timo Sirainen said:
> http://dovecot.org/releases/dovecot-1.0.0.tar.gz
> http://dovecot.org/releases/dovecot-1.0.0.tar.gz.sig
> 
> It took almost 5 years, but it's finally ready. I'm not expecting to
> release v1.0.1 anytime soon, unless someone's been sitting on a major
> bug just waiting for v1.0 to be released. :)
> 
> People wanting new features should start testing the upcoming v1.1.
> http://dovecot.org/nightly/ contains now snapshots from CVS HEAD. It
> already has tons of new features. I've been using it myself for half a
> year, so it should be mostly stable too. I'll write a separate mail
> about this later.
> 

Congrats Timo!