Timo Sirainen wrote:
On 21.6.2004, at 21:04, Bill Moran wrote:
Subject says it all.
(I'm almost positive this is a FAQ, or that the information is online _somewhere_, but I just spent 20 minutes without finding it ... sorry if I didn't search hard enough)
Well, main Dovecot web page says it:
"Dovecot can work with standard mbox and maildir formats and it's fully compatible with UW-IMAP and Courier IMAP servers as well as mail clients accessing the mailboxes directly. I have also plans to support storing mails in SQL databases."
Still not in my near future plans, although I've had one guy contact me about making Dovecot use a library derived from dbmail as a backend.
I don't think it's really worth it to store mails in SQL database, unless you really need to do it for some reason. Performance is most likely never the reason to do it. Reliability and interoperability might be.
I had a conversation with the same fellow a while back.
I'm told that dbmail is actually very fast in mail retrieval. But I was unable to confirm it myself.
If such a venture where to be undertaken, I would reconsider their (dbmail) use of postgresql database structure. They do not build and design the database with indexed retrieval in mind. They are missing 90% of the performance capabilities that could be obtained by using such a powerful database back-end.
In short, they store the entire header in one field and the entire body in another field. Hardly optimized for the three or four most common sorts (date, subject, sender, threaded)