[Dovecot] OT: The big picture (was: Re: Saving Sent Messages to Sent Folder)

[Patrick Nagel]

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Hi Ed,

On 2010-03-05 19:18, Ed W wrote:
> Go on... Why's that..?
> 
> Weight of history defines that we do things in certain ways and we
> sometimes get stuck in a bit of a rut, but if M$ has shown us one thing
> it's that we should (cautiously) look at how disparate systems can be
> integrated into a cohesive whole (granted they also showed how you can
> make an insecure system also, but I think that's an optional problem).
> 
> Not a dig at Dovecot, but: many software projects overlook the
> opportunity to integrate with other systems and become larger than the
> individual pieces.  An example in point would be that I'm sitting here
> battling with SNMP + Cacti + Nagios trying to get them all to talk to
> each other... There has to be a reason Groundworks charges so much for
> selling you a package where this is already done...
> 
> Spinning off at a tangent, but I fell in love with (the concept of)
> Lotus Notes some 18 years ago.  The way I saw it was a massive
> distributed multi-master data store + some presentation layers which
> could make any database look like whatever you wanted it to look like. 
> I used it for:
> - Email inbox
> - Calendar
> - Project documentation, discussion and design
> - Staff holiday tracking
> - Recruitment workflow (track all candidate details, results of
> interviews, contact correspondence, etc)
> - Loads of inhouse custom one off projects
> 
> I also used it as an SQL database (with a bit of magic) and built an
> application used to handle billions of £s of financing for a UK bank. 
> The IRA blew up one of the banks offices (which kind of stopped the
> server working so well), all the staff simply changed their Notes tel
> number to that of a different office and just carried on as though
> nothing had happened...  No data lost, work carried on
> 
> I had naively assumed that IMAP servers would head down the same road...
> To my eye it's all just unstructured data and I really don't see what's
> so special about a CalDev server or an SMTP server which makes it
> anything other than a plugin to "an unstructured data store".
> 
> If anyone starts to buy that idea then lift your vision and imagine that
> we start to see all these just distributed databases, specialist
> interfaces to query them efficiently and a bunch of protocols to
> distribute documents between the databases - personally I would then
> vote we start to shift to some kind of jabber style protocol to connect
> all these datastores together.  Once you head down that road you can
> imagine perhaps an MMS style storage model where the sender hosts all
> the mail storage and just sends a short "SMS" note to the recipient to
> let them know an email is waiting for them. (possibly even has some
> small positive anti-spam benefit...)

... kind of reminds me of Wave. I see a huge potential in Wave, once
they get the federation part and some other details right. :)

Patrick.

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