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MailKit is a personal open source project that I have put thousands of hours into perfecting with the goal of making it the very best email framework for .NET. I need your help to achieve this.

Donating helps pay for things such as web hosting, domain registration and licenses for developer tools such as a performance profiler, memory profiler, a static code analysis tool, and more. It also helps motivate me to continue working on the project.

The main goal of this project is to provide the .NET world with robust, fully featured and RFC-compliant SMTP, POP3, and IMAP client implementations.

All of the other .NET IMAP client implementations that I could find suffer from major architectural problems such as ignoring unexpected untagged responses, assuming that literal string tokens will never be used for anything other than message bodies (when in fact they could be used for pretty much any string token in a response), assuming that the way to find the end of a message body in a FETCH response is by scanning for ") UID", and not properly handling mailbox names with international characters to simply name a few.

IMAP requires a LOT of time spent laboriously reading and re-reading the IMAP specifications (as well as the MIME specifications) to understand all of the subtleties of the protocol and most (all?) of the other Open Source .NET IMAP libraries, at least, were written by developers that only cared enough that it worked for their simple needs. There's nothing necessarily wrong with doing that, but the web is full of half-working, non-RFC-compliant IMAP implementations out there that it was finally time for a carefully designed and implemented IMAP client library to be written.

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