[Dovecot] Using MySQL For Mailboxes?

[Bradley Giesbrecht]

On Mar 8, 2010, at 8:00 AM, Carlos Mennens wrote:

> On Mon, Mar 8, 2010 at 10:55 AM, Timo Sirainen <tss at iki.fi> wrote:
>> Dovecot supports looking up user information from MySQL, but not
>> actually storing mails there. If you really wanted to store mails on
>> MySQL, you'd have to use dbmail instead of Dovecot.
>
> Is it even worth it with less than 500 users? I mean I don't have any
> problems right now creating individual users and their home
> directories in Linux but I have never used MySQL for mail so can't
> differentiate the two. I guess I don't even know if this worth the
> effort to change my configuration especially if it involves changing
> out my IMAP server for 'dbmail' which I know nothing about until you
> mentioned it.


No one will be able to answer what something is worth to you.

If your 500 users are mostly email only then you will probably enjoy  
storing email addresses, passwords, paths to mailboxes, quotes etc...  
in mysql.

This is how you can use mysql with dovecot. The emails will still be  
stored on a file system in one of the popular mailbox formats like  
mbox, maildir, etc....

// Brad