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).
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.
Nevertheless, DBMail exists- it's an SQL backed IMAP server, and its active- and supports MySQL (in addition to SQLite and PostgreSQL).
It's not as fast as dovecot at many things (as expected), but it's fun to play with, and I've used it to experiment with new mail access methods- i.e. non-IMAP access to messages.
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