On Sun, Jan 30, 2022 at 07:49:56PM -0900, justina colmena ~biz wrote:
On January 30, 2022 6:30:44 PM AKST, Sam Kuper wrote:
On Sun, Jan 30, 2022 at 06:17:49PM -0900, justina colmena ~biz wrote:
On January 30, 2022 5:46:53 PM AKST, dovecot@ptld.com wrote:
Storing mail in a db... at the end of the day isn't it still just a file (.db file) on the drive?
Aren't you just adding bloat and complexity vs just storing the mail directly (maildir format) to a file on the drive? [...]
You'll get better indexing and fast full text search by storing your emails in a database rather than a flat file, hopefully after decoding any attachments. Especially for spam scoring, analysis, and classification. Much better performance deleting or moving specific messages, too.
Do you have evidence to back up these claims, specifically re: mail servers?
Like-for-like benchmarks, for instance?
Just ideas.
OK, no then.
Removing or deleting a single message from near the beginning of a large flat file takes an inordinate amount of time because the remainder of the flat file has to be rewritten all the way from the point of the deleted message to the end of the file and then truncated.
You might want to look up what Maildir is before making bold but apparently unfounded claims about it.
Maildir is not a "large flat file". It is a set of conventions that amount to a database specification, in the traditional sense of the word "database": a system for storing data. (Not a relational database.)
DJB developed Maildir to gain performance and reliability improvements over mbox files. Unlike Maildirs, mbox files *are* "large flat files".
Best wishes,
Sam
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