[OT] Re: What's the best possible email failover solution

[David E. Meier]

> The other advantages is it would scale like nobody's business.  Since the
> data is in postgres, you could use multiple backends (replicated with
> Slony)
> and have the IMAP daemons contact different back ends if the load got
> heavy.  With a little work, the system could failover silently as well.

It would be very nice indeed.

> Like I said, we'll never know till someone tries it.  It looks like
> Dovecot is going to try it eventually, but it seems like they have
> other priorities at this time.

"Someone" already stores mails in a database: Oracle (Email Server and
Collaboration Suite). I set up the Oracle Email Server 5.2 for a company I
worked for earlier. And to express it nicely: It was a nightmare! Mails
got stuck and rejected because the system was not capable of writing them
into the database. Besides, the support for that system was also =0. We
were probably the only ones daring to run the system ;-) I am glad I am
running cyrus now. Extremly stable and fast.

That system was not well thought through at all. I don't know how much
work needs to be done for a database email store, but Oracle wasn't
(isn't) able to do so.

Dave