As far as I'm concerned, the DB mailstore gives FAR more flexibilty than any filestore ever could. I have the ability to totally modularize my mail system. I can have a separte machine for each step in the process, (smtp, content filter, storage, imap/pop3). I can even have multiple machines at each step. Also using DB replication or clustering techniques gives an extremely fault tollerant setup. All this can be done with comodity hardware.
The only way to match such a great setup with filesystem based mailstores would be to use a distributed filesystem...which in my experience is a bad idea (like nfs sharing the mailstore), or would be too expensive to do the right way (like using shared raid arrays...), or stuff isn't implemented quite yet (i haven't seen a clustered distributed filesystem that's opensource/free and production quality). Also it makes life as a sysadmin easier...it's alot easier to do a couple of sql queries to undelete some user's mailbox than it is to sit and go through backup tapes to restore a mailbox to the filesystem... It's also pretty simple to backup the mailsystem each night (mysqldump). Also, DB's were designed for finding data fast...and when you're searching your mailbox, that's exactly what you're doing... I mean isn't this why there's alot of reasearch going into developing DB based filesystems? I may be way off base, but I have yet to see any instance where a filesystem backend is better... Even if there was, the total of the benefits of DB way outweighs what few benefits a filesystem can offer... Just my opinion... Doug Using postfix,amavis-new/spamassassin,dbmail2-cvs on gentoo
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