And with great power comes great frustration: Instead of taking 50msec to fetch a message, it takes 80msec, and instead of taking 25msec to load a message into a mailbox, it now takes 200-500msec!
I think the bottom line is that the original poster is very fond of MySQL - which is actually a great database, among others. But I fear he underestimates the load that a large mailserver would impose on any classical database system - many indexes would have to be regenerated all the time because with every incoming mail the fundamental data changes. I get his idea but fear that storing everything away to SQL is the wrong solution; we would end up putting large smtp proxies before the server in order to keep it running. This is a very different situation from a SQL driven http server where even in a shop system most data structures and their indexes remain constant most of the time. Another point is that it took the community years to produce a production-ripe version of a http server with DB backend. I think for the dovecot community this is not feasible at the moment. If there is a group of people willing to write a sort of plugin to support SQL, probably nobody here will object. But in the meantime I would like to see this list coming back to the more pressing thing of getting 1.0 out & running.
Yours, Jakob Curdes