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

[Bill Moran]

Chuck Swiger <cswiger at 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