[Dovecot] NoSQL Storage Backend

[Marten Lehmann]

Hello,

I found a posting on the mailing list from 2008 "Adding new storage 
backend to Dovecot" while searching for POP3 and IMAP servers, that 
allow to use a NoSQL backend rather than a traditional file system.

The problem with traditional filesystems is, that they are very limited. 
You cannot easily extend it, even with RAID 10 all messages may be lost 
due to a RAID controller failure and just-in-time backups of a heavy 
loaded system with consistently changing messages folders are virtually 
impossible.

Modern object stores like Scality, CouchDB or MongoDB can be very handy, 
as they easily allow to keep an arbitrary amount of copies of each 
message on different servers, you can simply add a storage node and new 
storage is immediately available and mailboxes aren't bound to a certain 
server any longer, but messages are evenly distributed across all 
storage nodes, thus distributing load as well.

Since the original posting was dated 2008 I was in good hope, that 
someone worked on that already, but at least in 
dovecot-2.0.9/src/lib-storage I couldn't find anything relating to NoSQL 
message stores.

Isn't this option of big interest for every bigger mailbox provider? How 
hard would it be to develop? Would it be possible to get this developed 
on a paid basis by the dovecot core team?

Kind regards
Marten