[Dovecot] Is Dovecot able to use PostgreSQL to store mailboxes?

[Tom Allison]

Timo Sirainen wrote:
> On 21.6.2004, at 21:04, Bill Moran wrote:
> 
>> Subject says it all.
>>
>> (I'm almost positive this is a FAQ, or that the information is online
>> _somewhere_, but I just spent 20 minutes without finding it ... sorry 
>> if I
>> didn't search hard enough)
> 
> 
> Well, main Dovecot web page says it:
> 
> "Dovecot can work with standard mbox and maildir formats and it's fully 
> compatible with UW-IMAP and Courier IMAP servers as well as mail clients 
> accessing the mailboxes directly. I have also plans to support storing 
> mails in SQL databases."
> 
> Still not in my near future plans, although I've had one guy contact me 
> about making Dovecot use a library derived from dbmail as a backend.
> 
> I don't think it's really worth it to store mails in SQL database, 
> unless you really need to do it for some reason. Performance is most 
> likely never the reason to do it. Reliability and interoperability might 
> be.

I had a conversation with the same fellow a while back.

I'm told that dbmail is actually very fast in mail retrieval.  But I was 
unable to confirm it myself.

If such a venture where to be undertaken, I would reconsider their 
(dbmail) use of postgresql database structure.  They do not build and 
design the database with indexed retrieval in mind.  They are missing 
90% of the performance capabilities that could be obtained by using such 
a powerful database back-end.

In short, they store the entire header in one field and the entire body 
in another field.  Hardly optimized for the three or four most common 
sorts (date, subject, sender, threaded)