http://dovecot.org/releases/1.2/alpha/dovecot-1.2.alpha1.tar.gz
http://dovecot.org/releases/1.2/alpha/dovecot-1.2.alpha1.tar.gz.sig

This is the only v1.2.alpha announcement I'm going to send to
dovecot-news list. Next announcement will be for either v1.2.beta1 or
v1.2.rc1.

I'm hoping that v1.2 stabilizes pretty soon. There are no huge changes
like there were in 0.99->1.0 or 1.0->1.1, so most of the bugs are
probably related to new features. I'm already running v1.2 myself and
it's gone through heavy stress testing with my imaptest tool, so I'm
expecting it to be stable enough for real world testing with
not-all-that-important servers. It's safe to jump between v1.1 and v1.2
at any time or even have them concurrently accessing the same mailboxes.

Dovecot v1.2 has a lot of new IMAP extensions implemented. The biggest
change comes from CONDSTORE extension which adds a new concept of
"modification sequences" (modseq for short). Each message has a modseq
that increases whenever a flag is changed or when the message is
expunged. The client can keep track of the highest seen modseq and
request only changes done since the modseq. See QRESYNC (RFC 5162) for
more information. Dovecot starts keeping track of the modseqs only when
the first "CONDSTORE/QRESYNC enabling command" is executed. Before that
no disk space is used for modseqs. When modseqs are enabled
dovecot.index file uses 8 bytes per message more space.

Other implemented IMAP extensions are: ESEARCH, SEARCHRES, WITHIN, ID
and CONTEXT=SEARCH.

Added thread indexes to optimize IMAP THREAD command. Only the first
half of threading is currently optimized, the rest will hopefully follow
later.

Added a non-standard X-REFERENCES2 threading algorithm where threads are
sorted by their latest message instead of the thread root message. There
is also no base subject merging. This may be renamed and become part of
SEARCH=INTHREAD extension some day.

SEARCH=INTHREAD is still a draft, but the INTHREAD search key is already
implemented by Dovecot v1.2. This is mostly useful with virtual
mailboxes.

Virtual mailboxes: http://wiki.dovecot.org/Plugins/Virtual

Then there are also some internal API changes which will make some
things easier. For example lib-storage now allows handling multiple
different users at the same time.