[Dovecot] scalability and arhive ideas

[Timo Sirainen]

On Tue, 2009-08-25 at 12:41 -0300, fernando at dfcom.com.br wrote:

> I´m suggesting the opposite, to not have an abstraction layer. The
> abstraction layer would be the proxy - dovecot does the abstraction layer.
> When I´m telling 'proxy' I meaning something like the proxy feature of the
> dovecot.

Dovecot needs to read/write data, so the part of Dovecot that does that
is the filesystem abstraction layer. Or if you'd prefer it could be
called I/O layer. On top of that you could build all kinds of I/O
accesses (all running in Dovecot processes):

 - regular filesystem
 - database
 - your proxy thingy

> And in my head the final solution is very 'simple' (despite of its hard
> programming work). Dovecot just access 'in parallel' a set of servers,
> requesting their informations (really, with imap connection) and caches
> them - the results (maybe in some database, as you suggested). It would be
> an extension of the proxy feature that already exists at dovecot.

Well.. This is what I initially thought you might have meant, but.. You
wanted to distribute one user's mails across multiple servers, right? So
they would exist in multiple different servers and Dovecot would access
them via IMAP and somehow gather them together and show to user? That
would be horribly difficult to implement via IMAP.

I have thought about implementing a caching IMAP proxy though. But the
main use of that would be if the primary server was somewhere with
higher latency or lower bandwidth. And implementing even that is going
to take a lot of work.
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