Geo Carncross wrote:
On Tue, 2006-06-06 at 08:25 -0700, Marc Perkel wrote:
I'm suggesting it in addition to MBOX and MAILDIR. And of course if there's a MySQL version then other databases will follow. Just seems to me that if I were running a really BIG email operation that MySQL could have some serious benefits.
Using a "big ol' SQL database" will ALWAYS give _worse performance_ than a specialized solution (like dbox), and will usually give _worse performance_ than a naive but still specialized solution (like maildir or mbox).
Not true for "always". If you have 100,000 messages in a folder the database will win easy.
SQL's strengths are mutability, not performance- regardless of what you or others might think. USUALLY the database performance is "good enough" for most applications- but that doesn't mean it's even remotely close to optimal.
If you have a large system then what you might want is power and if you want speed you just spend more money for faster hardware.
Nevertheless, DBMail exists- it's an SQL backed IMAP server, and its active- and supports MySQL (in addition to SQLite and PostgreSQL).
I'd like to see Dovecot have that option as well.