Thanks again mr. bathory for your answers, it really helped a lot, especially for being the only person to respond.

Is dovecot better than slackware's native pop3/imap server? Also with postfix vs. sendmail.

Hi,
IMO it is. UW-imap that comes with Slackware is not actively maintained and I guess it lacks some features compared to dovecot. You can have a look here for more details about UW-imap.

Sendmail is one of the first MTAs used in linux, that's why most application that need to send out mail are calling the sendmail executable. Postfix was developed later as a (secure) alternative of sendmail and for the above reason it comes with a sendmail replacement binary.
Anyway apart from the sendmail cryptic configuration, I don't think they have any big differences. For a comparison between the most common MTAs have a look here

Regards

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ok, i have read somwhere about slackware's pop3 server being UW, i can't remember where, right now, but it isn't such important... my question still is: what IMO stands for; what is it?

In my opinion.