email location - files or sql

[Shawn Heisey]

On 2/22/2022 9:12 AM, Robert Moskowitz wrote:
> What I am seeing is that many of the packages seem to roll the messages 
> into some SQL database.  My Dovecot setup uses the 
> /home/vmail/doman/../{cur,new,etc} tree structure.

I use dovecot and postfix in conjunction with a postfixadmin database in 
mysql.

The emails are stored on the filesystem using Maildir, not in the 
database.  Configuration and authentication information for domains and 
users are in the database.  Quotas are in the database.  I have several 
gigabytes of email between the many accounts and would not want that 
stored in a huge database table file.  Although I am sure something 
exists that stores messages in a database with dovecot, I have yet to 
see it.

While a database would probably be more efficient in terms of disk space 
utilization, it would be much less efficient to make incremental 
rsync-based backups like I do currently.  I use rsync to copy only 
changes rather than the entire archive, and btrfs snapshots for a history.

Thanks,
Shawn