[2] On 4 August 2008, staff at the University of Washington who had been involved in developing UW IMAP, Pine, and Alpine,[citation needed] announced that they would "shift our effort from direct development into more of a consultation and coordination role to help integrate contributions from the community,"[16] in the wake of layoffs at the University of Washington's technology division.

[25][26] This feature, together with UW IMAP's default use of monolithic mailbox files, was intended to ensure compatibility with legacy operating systems and email management practices,[citation needed] but drew criticism from some commentators.

[27][28] In particular, Sam Varshavchik, developer of the competing Courier IMAP server, suggested that Crispin's decision not to add support for maildir (a popular non-monolithic mailbox format) to UW IMAP may have stemmed from lingering resentment over an earlier disagreement that Crispin had had with maildir's designer, Daniel J.

[32] UW IMAP was designed to be compatible with existing legacy mail stores and systems, and to be "plug-and-play" installable without requiring any site-specific configuration.

[citation needed] Also bundled with UW IMAP are POP2 and POP3 servers,[33][26] the mailutil utility program, and the dmail and tmail mail delivery agents.

[35][independent source needed] The patched Pine instance can then be used to compile UW IMAP with nominal maildir support.