Dovecot supports maildir as well as mbox. On 6 Dec 2013 21:35, "Zachary Sturgeon" zsturgeon@pccc.com wrote:

Hello,

I am researching using dovecot with an SQL database as the storage backend. From what I've read, dovecot only supports mbox style file storage, but I'd like to investigate the possibility of using a database instead.

According to http://dovecot.org/pipermail/dovecot/2006-June/013818.html, this possibility has been explored before and has generally been accepted that Dovecot is not optimized to handle this.

Any suggestions?

• Zachary Sturgeon

Zachary Sturgeon zsturgeon@pccc.com wrote:

I am researching using dovecot with an SQL database as the storage backend. From what I've read, dovecot only supports mbox style file storage, but I'd like to investigate the possibility of using a database instead.

According to http://dovecot.org/pipermail/dovecot/2006-June/013818.html, this possibility has been explored before and has generally been accepted that Dovecot is not optimized to handle this.

Any suggestions?

There is one relational database based mail-system out there I know of: DBMail.

In my opinion its performance compared with the cost of reaching good performance (you need a very big database server or cluster with tons of RAM) is problematic.

Relational databases are not very suited for the storage of the largely unstructured data format called "mail". You could do this, but you would degrade your relational database to a simple object storage, not being able to use the full feature set. (The commercial Dovecot Pro version features several object storage plugins: http://www.dovecot.fi/products/)

And most operating systems already include a very fast and highly optimized object storage: a filesystem.

Also see this discussion from March 2012: http://www.dovecot.org/list/dovecot/2012-March/064653.html

Grüße, Sven.

-- Sigmentation fault. Core dumped.