Eric Steven Raymond, often referred to as ESR, is an American software developer, open-source software advocate, and author of the 1997 essay and 1999 book The Cathedral and the Bazaar. He wrote a guidebook for the Roguelike game NetHack. In the 1990s, he edited and updated the Jargon File, published as The New Hacker's Dictionary.
In computing, the Internet Message Access Protocol (IMAP) is an Internet standard protocol used by email clients to retrieve email messages from a mail server over a TCP/IP connection. IMAP is defined by RFC 9051.
The Cathedral and the Bazaar: Musings on Linux and Open Source by an Accidental Revolutionary is an essay, and later a book, by Eric S. Raymond on software engineering methods, based on his observations of the Linux kernel development process and his experiences managing an open source project, fetchmail. It examines the struggle between top-down and bottom-up design. The essay was first presented by Raymond at the Linux Kongress on May 27, 1997 in Würzburg (Germany) and was published as the second chapter of the same‑titled book in 1999.
Sendmail is a general purpose internetwork email routing facility that supports many kinds of mail-transfer and delivery methods, including the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) used for email transport over the Internet.
The Maildir e-mail format is a common way of storing email messages in which each message is stored in a separate file with a unique name, and each mail folder is a file system directory. The local file system handles file locking as messages are added, moved and deleted. A major design goal of Maildir is to eliminate the need for program code to handle file locking and unlocking.
A message delivery agent (MDA), or mail delivery agent, is a computer software component that is responsible for the delivery of e-mail messages to a local recipient's mailbox. It is also called a local delivery agent (LDA).
procmail is an email server software component — specifically, a message delivery agent (MDA). It was one of the earliest mail filter programs. It is typically used in Unix-like mail systems, using the mbox and Maildir storage formats.
Mark Reed Crispin is best known as the father of the Internet Message Access Protocol (IMAP), having invented it in 1985 during his time at the Stanford Knowledge Systems Laboratory. He is the author or co-author of numerous RFCs and was the principal author of UW IMAP, one of the reference implementations of the IMAP4rev1 protocol described in RFC 3501. He also designed the MIX mail storage format.
Kontact is a personal information manager and groupware software suite developed by KDE. It supports calendars, contacts, notes, to-do lists, news, and email. It offers a number of inter-changeable graphical UIs all built on top of a common core.
The Cyrus IMAP server is electronic mail server software developed by Carnegie Mellon University. It differs from other Internet Message Access Protocol (IMAP) server implementations in that it is generally intended to be run on sealed servers, where normal users cannot log in.
getmail is a simple mail retrieval agent intended as a replacement for fetchmail, implemented in Python. It can retrieve mail from POP3, IMAP4, and Standard Dial-up POP3 Service servers, with or without SSL. It supports simple and domain (multidrop) mailboxes, mail filtering via any arbitrary program, and supports a wide variety of mail destination types, including mboxrd, maildir, and external arbitrary mail delivery agents. Unlike fetchmail, getmail's Python foundation makes it nearly immune to buffer overflow security holes. It also has a simpler configuration syntax than fetchmail, but supports fewer authentication protocols. The software can also function as a basic mail delivery agent.
Dovecot is an open-source IMAP and POP3 server for Unix-like operating systems, written primarily with security in mind. Timo Sirainen originated Dovecot and first released it in July 2002. Dovecot developers primarily aim to produce a lightweight, fast and easy-to-set-up open-source email server.
Open-source software development (OSSD) is the process by which open-source software, or similar software whose source code is publicly available, is developed by an open-source software project. These are software products available with its source code under an open-source license to study, change, and improve its design. Examples of some popular open-source software products are Mozilla Firefox, Google Chromium, Android, LibreOffice and the VLC media player.
The UW IMAP server was the reference server implementation of the Internet Message Access Protocol. It was developed at the University of Washington by Mark Crispin and others.
Roundcube is a web-based IMAP email client. Roundcube's most prominent feature is the pervasive use of Ajax technology. Roundcube is free and open-source software subject to the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL-3.0-or-later), with exceptions for skins and plugins.
Citadel is a collaboration suite that is directly descended from the Citadel family of programs which became popular in the 1980s and 1990s as a bulletin board system platform. It is designed to run on open source operating systems such as Linux or BSD. Although it is being used for many bulletin board systems, in 1998 the developers began to expand its functionality to a general purpose groupware platform.
The comparison of mail servers covers mail transfer agents (MTAs), mail delivery agents, and other computer software that provide e-mail services.
An e-mail agent is a program that is part of the e-mail infrastructure, from composition by sender, to transfer across the network, to viewing by recipient. The best-known are message user agents and message transfer agents, but finer divisions exist.
The JSON Meta Application Protocol (JMAP) is a set of related open Internet Standard protocols for handling email. JMAP is implemented using JSON APIs over HTTP and has been developed as an alternative to IMAP/SMTP and proprietary email APIs such as Gmail and Outlook. Additional protocols and data models being built on top of the core of JMAP for handling contacts and calendar synchronization are meant to be potential replacements for CardDAV and CalDAV, and other support is currently in the works.
fdm is a mail delivery agent and email filtering software for Unix-like operating systems, similar to fetchmail and procmail. It was started in 2006 by Nicholas Marriott who later also started tmux in 2007.
