[Dovecot] SQL mail storage - yes yes yes!

[Marc Perkel]

Timo Sirainen wrote:
> I wasted some time yesterday and today implementing a SQL storage
> plugin. It seems to be working, but:
>
>  - Saving new messages is done in a regular INSERT statement, which is
> bad. PostgreSQL has at least this COPY TO command which could be used
> instead.
>  - It breaks in stress testing
>  - It's not that well optimized. Especially it could support caching
> some commonly requested fields (same as dovecot.index.cache file).
>  - Currently works only with PostgreSQL.
>
> Nothing is committed to CVS yet. I'm not sure if I should even do that.
> I'm not sure if those lib-sql API changes were that great. Maybe there's
> a better way..
>
> If you're interested in trying it, you need the latest CVS HEAD sources
> and these patches:
>
> http://dovecot.org/patches/sql-storage-changes.diff
> http://dovecot.org/patches/sql-storage-plugin.diff
>
> The SQL schema is in src/plugins/mail-sql/schema.sql file. It creates a
> "tss" named user by default, so you might want to modify that. :)
>
> Then set:
>
> mail_location = sql:pgsql:host=localhost dbname=mails user=mailuser
> password=foo
> mail_plugins = mail_sql
>
>   

I've been waiting till 1.0 came out to ask for new features like SQL. I 
don't think that SQL is a waste of time at all. In fact I believe that 
SQL is the future of email storage. SQL has a lot of advantages that 
will be tapped once people start using it. Yes - it is probably slower 
than mbox or maildir but you can make up for that with faster computers. 
SQL offers.

Replication - the ability to have instant redundancy on multiple servers.

The ability to undeliver messages - if the indexes are configured right, 
if you get a spam attack from an IP and after the attack you realize it 
was spam you can run a quick query and delete delivered email.

Statistical advantages - admins can do email queries across all domains 
and all usersand all folders to gather useful information. An example 
might be to generate white list information that can be used for trusted 
email sources to bypass spam filtering and reduce false positives.

Search Speed - should be a lot faster to search messages than maildir.

And - there's probably a lot of things that will be realized once it's 
implemented because the indexing ability opens new posibilities.

So - I definitely am someone who supports this idea. It will also make 
Dovecot stand out as a superior IMAP server.

Go for it!