[Dovecot] SQL mail storage - yes yes yes!

[Stephen Lee]

On Sat, 2007-03-31 at 19:30 +0200, Martin Hudec wrote:
<snip>
> 
> Well imagine that we have 100 users in company, each of them has 200M 
> mailbox usually filled at least to 150M. That gives us 15G database (I 
> am not counting administrative overhead like indexes etc.).
> 
> Lovely. What would such database solution require, for example running 
> on MySQL (usual database for many of the small businesses out there), I 
> cannot truly say now and I am afraid of it. It would be a hard beast. In 
> terms of maintenance and also of resources requirements.
> 
> When using mail server with maildir/mailbox we have two components: mail 
> server software alone and disk subsystem. When using database we would 
> get mail server software plus database software and disk subsystem. Thus 
> introducing new component with new unknown behaviors in certain situations.
> 
> Martin

WRT size of the db, what about keeping just the message headers and
indices in the db and the body as a file? This is akin to some content
management systems where the file info is in a db and the content
resides as a file. Don't know what the logistics and performance issues
are though. Clearly SQL mail storage is not for everyone.

Stephen