[massive quote removed]
I've been warned about this. If I could retract my question. My apologies for those that have seen this thread a million times before. I'm way more interested in my dovecot question.
Notice how I clipped the posts above yours? If you're going to participate in public written forums, you need to learn how to trim all that's irrelevant, leaving the reader with just the context needed to understand what you're replying to. We can check the archives if we need any more than that.
Returning to original topic, UW-IMAP was dropped mainly for what appear to be maintenance issues. The upstream author isn't particularly interested in working with the distro providers, or at least this is what I gather from reading the RH-authored bugzillas about his package.
If you provide any publicly-accessible service, you should subscribe to at least the announcement list for that subsystem, to get early warning of security and operational issues. For BIND and DHCP, subscribe to the ISC lists. For Dovecot, subscribe to the Dovecot lists. (UW-IMAP's list is "cclient", referring to the underlying library.) A quick google or a check of the documentation in /usr/share/doc should tell you how to subscribe for each service you provide.
I'd also recommend checking comp.mail.imap and comp.mail.sendmail (if you use that MTA) regularly. Comparing Dovecot, UW-IMAP, and other IMAP products would best be done in comp.mail.imap. Mark Crispin, author of UW-IMAP and the IMAP RFC, monitors that newsgroup.
