On 06-06-2006 15:48:20 +0200, nodata wrote:

...

Putting everything in a database would provide one benefit:

• Less storage space needed due to duplicated e-mail

... assuming that the mails are completely identical (i.e. have no slightly different headers) and that the database backend does expensive duplicate elimination on its string heaps.

Yes, like Exchange does (unless you did something "clever" with the headers).

So the real benefit you get I think is:

• full text searching capabilities based on the IR-like indices provided/maintained by the database backend, such as for instance: http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/fulltext-query-expansion.html

If the original poster if struggling with a filesystem version of dovecot, and wants to create "massive and reliable systems" using MySQL, then he's going to have trouble. Adding MySQL won't do that.