Dovecot
IMAP and POP3 server written primarily with security in mind.
Description from awesome-selfhosted (CC BY-SA 3.0)
Still maintained? Yes: 1,223 commits in the last 90 days, latest release 2.4.5 (Aug 2026).
At a glance
Dovecot quick facts
- Health score
- 82/100 GOOD
- Stars
- 1,273
- Last commit
- yesterday (Oct 2026)
- Latest release
- 2.4.5, Aug 2026
Top alternatives to Dovecot
Why it ranks here
Health score explained
Dovecot scores 82/100, #1 of 3 in Communication - Email - Mail Delivery Agents: 1,223 commits in the last 90 days earn 35.0 of 35 points, the latest release (2.4.5, 2 months ago) earns 25.0 of 25, 1,273 stars add 12.4 of 20, an active, unarchived repository keeps 10 and no advertised Docker image leaves the final 10 unclaimed. That places it in the good band (70 and above). The biggest shortfall is Docker support, worth 10.0 more points.
Recomputed nightly from the GitHub API. How the score is calculated.
- Commit activity 35.0 / 35
1223 commits in 90 days (30+ scores full marks)
- Release recency 25.0 / 25
2.4.5 released 2 months ago
- Stars 12.4 / 20
1.3k stars on GitHub (logarithmic)
- Not archived 10.0 / 10
Repository is active
- Docker support biggest shortfall 0.0 / 10
No Docker support advertised
Commit activity
- 1223
- Last 90 days
- 2,218
- Last 12 months
- yesterday
- Last push
Ranked #1 of 3 tools in Communication - Email - Mail Delivery Agents by health , just above Cyrus IMAP (#2) .
Details
| Licence | MIT, LGPL-2.1 |
| Platforms | C, deb |
| Latest release | 2.4.5 · 2 months ago |
| Stars | 1,273 |
| Open issues | 0 |
| Docker | Not advertised |
| Repository | dovecot/core ↗ |
Dovecot vs its top 2 alternatives
Active tools that share a category with Dovecot (Communication - Email - Mail Delivery Agents), scored on the same five terms.
| Tool | Health | Stars | Licence | Last commit |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Dovecot (this tool) | 82 | 1.3k | MIT | yesterday |
| Cyrus IMAP | 81 | 652 | BSD-3-Clause-Attribution | yesterday |
| DavMail | 57 | 774 | GPL-2.0 | yesterday |
Dovecot: common questions
Is Dovecot still maintained?
Dovecot had 1,223 commits in the last 90 days and its last push was yesterday; the latest tagged release, 2.4.5, is from 2 months ago. Repoly recomputes this nightly.