Date: Mon, 21 Jun 2004 20:41:11 -0400 From: Bill Moran <wmoran@potentialtech.com> To: Chuck Swiger <cswiger@mac.com> Cc: questions@freebsd.org Subject: [OT] Re: What's the best possible email failover solution Message-ID: <20040621204111.6e684d45.wmoran@potentialtech.com> In-Reply-To: <40D76DA3.9090809@mac.com> References: <20040621132006.2b1a296f.wmoran@potentialtech.com> <a22ff294040621115173bad2e0@mail.gmail.com> <20040621172520.3544d6fe.wmoran@potentialtech.com> <20040621214348.GB63857@happy-idiot-talk.infracaninophile.co.uk> <20040621175626.3e762448.wmoran@potentialtech.com> <40D76DA3.9090809@mac.com>
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Chuck Swiger <cswiger@mac.com> wrote: <snip> > [ I don't think that stuffing email into a database is a particularly good > idea since that means keeping large blobs of non-relational data floating > around, something that the filesystem can do a better job of handling... ] Actually ... you got me thinking. I did some research about a year ago because I was going to write a mail server. It was mainly going to be an education project so I could learn some things. I'd forgotten about this until now. During my research of the IMAP protocol, I determined that _the_best_ way to store email for high-performance would be to put them in a database. This is because IMAP doesn't see email as a big blob of text like POP does. It sees the headers as one thing, and the different MIME parts of the email each as a seperate thing that can be fetched independently of the other MIME parts. This is a pretty good layout for a one -> many relationship in a database. Fact is, every current IMAP server that I'm aware of has to break emails apart on the fly in order to server IMAP. Now, I could be wrong on this count, as I never wrote the mailserver, so my theory could ultimately be proven wrong, but I guess I just don't agree with the statement that SQL is a bad way to store email until someone has actually proven it. -- Bill Moran Potential Technologies http://www.potentialtech.com
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