When comparing Dovecot-lda vs Procmail, the Slant community recommends Dovecot-lda for most people. In the question“What are the best Linux mail delivery agents (MDAs)?” Dovecot-lda is ranked 1st while Procmail is ranked 2nd. The most important reason people chose Dovecot-lda is:
Dovecot has a thorough [documentation](http://wiki2.dovecot.org/HowTo) and examples.
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Great documentation
Dovecot has a thorough documentation and examples.
Pro Works great with postfix
Dovecot-lda is commonly paired with postfix. As such there are a lot of resources available for setting them up together.
Pro Supports Sieve
Requires Pigeonhole sieve plugin.
Pro Quota enforcing
Pro Mailbox indexing during mail delivery
Pro Natively supports maildir, mbox and dbox
Pro Reliable
Over the years procmail has only had 3 vulnerabilities found and it still does what is was inteded for. As such it is considered by many to be a "finished" product that does not require any more maintenance. It is still packaged in many major distributions.
Pro Easy to use, robust filtering system
Procmail uses Extended Global Regular Expressions Print (egrep) that allows for advanced recipes.
Pro Widely used
Procmail has over the years gathered a loyal following that still provides support and examples.
Pro [delete me]
Cons
Con Don't support STMPUTF8 yet
Con Not maintained
Although still stable, development of procmail has stopped.
Con Archaic syntax
Procmail syntax can be intimidating and lack of cohesive documentation may turn off a lot of people.
Con Natively supports only mbox
Latest version supports maildir by specifying delivery path ending with a /.