email with a database

[Olivier Nicole]

> > is there an email solution that employs some kind of database that stores
> > mail for long term?  id rather not turn on "leave a copy on the server" as
> > this has shown to give poorer and poorer performance over time for me.
> People normally take backups of their machines in order to protect 
> against losing files, including your email.  You should be using IMAP 
> instead of POP3 if you want your email to reside on the server efficiently.

In fact you would want to use maildir format instead of mbox format
for your mailbox. That you use imap or pop3 is of little relevance on
the speed. Format of the mailbox is though.

In standard mbox format you have to open and manipulate one single
huge file, that keeps growing bigger and bigger. Browsing that file to
find the new/unseen messages can take several tens of second when your
mailbox gets too big.

In maildir format, you manipulates one file per message, new messages
being in a different directory from the seen messages. That makes the
file manipulation much faster.

Of course you can make tape archive of your mailbox (easier to archive
maildir format though as there is not risk of concurent access to a
message file).

And you can use procmail or the like to duplicate the message in a
file on your server.

Best regards,

Olivier