[Dovecot] SQL mail storage - yes yes yes!

[Martin Hudec]

Marc Perkel wrote:
> I've been waiting till 1.0 came out to ask for new features like SQL. I 
> don't think that SQL is a waste of time at all. In fact I believe that 
> SQL is the future of email storage. SQL has a lot of advantages that 
> will be tapped once people start using it. Yes - it is probably slower 
> than mbox or maildir but you can make up for that with faster computers. 
> SQL offers.

Well imagine that we have 100 users in company, each of them has 200M 
mailbox usually filled at least to 150M. That gives us 15G database (I 
am not counting administrative overhead like indexes etc.).

Lovely. What would such database solution require, for example running 
on MySQL (usual database for many of the small businesses out there), I 
cannot truly say now and I am afraid of it. It would be a hard beast. In 
terms of maintenance and also of resources requirements.

When using mail server with maildir/mailbox we have two components: mail 
server software alone and disk subsystem. When using database we would 
get mail server software plus database software and disk subsystem. Thus 
introducing new component with new unknown behaviors in certain situations.

Martin