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.