[Dovecot] scalability and arhive ideas

[fernando at dfcom.com.br]

Hi Timo,

Yes it´s related, but I don´t understand '... You'll just need to
implement a filesystem that allows distributing a single user's mails to
multiple servers ...'.

My idea is just in the direction that we don´t need to care about
filesystem, we don´t need any distribuited filesystem...let it be as user
wants....at any some proxy level, the end storage can be ext3, reiser, S.O
linux, freebsd, and so on.  I think that the more elements we insert, the
more complex and hard to mount/debug the solution would be.

Administrator maintains storage pairs, with any o.s/filesystem he wants-
his only work would be to create the accounts and folders at each storage
server (if you create a folder - you create at three servers - the same
for accounts) and set a database with the servers envolved at the process.
The account structure must be sync'ed, and messages will be stored where
the users want to.

I also like the idea to user some database to store message index.

Fernando

> On Tue, 2009-08-25 at 11:00 -0300, fernando at dfcom.com.br wrote:
>> this is very weird and (at same time) very interesting approach. Instead
>> of put all messages into one maildir and this maildir into one server,
>> this "maildir" (?) is spplited among many servers - so, if one servers
>> fails the account is still acessible and they move old/big messages to a
>> new "cheap" storage - archiving transparently.
>
> Well, this is somewhat related to the filesystem abstraction that I'm
> planning. You'll just need to implement a filesystem that allows
> distributing a single user's mails to multiple servers. That's actually
> also what I was planning on doing by using some existing database for
> that (Cassandra?) And sure it would be possible to implement all of that
> on my own, but probably it's too much trouble..
>
>