We are going to develop web-mail system, that's capable of handling relatively high loads. I know, there are many open source web-mail systems , but they doesn't satisfy me. Almost every falls into one of two cateogries: php based, using imap; perl cgi based, using IMAP or direct filesystem access...
I'd like someone experienced with such systems help me with the following: 1. Almost every available webmail system uses the following way of handling (rreceiving, in this example) attachements: load the whole message body from IMAP server or message file, decode it and send to the client. The _whole_ attachement gets loaded into server's RAM. Isn't it waste of resources/ killing the server ? I think it should read/decode/send the attachement on a line-by-line (or part-by-part generaly) manner. Am I right ? 2. Which one is better - accessing maildirs directly, or using IMAP ? I can see that IMAP seems to be more scalable / universal... Maildirs probably can be much faster to work with directly, but probably less secure... Any other pros/contras ? 3. I'm going to develop the front-end using Apache::ASP or php, not decided yet, and access the mails through the middle-tier daemon. The question is - is it a good way to use persistent IMAP connections ? If so, there will be no overhead of authentication on every operation, but there can be many open IMAP connections to the local imap server (probably Courier-IMAP) at the same time. Which strategy is better ? 4. Are there any libraries similar to c-client, maybe some C++ ones ? 5. Does c-client library allow to retrieve the message body (attachements) partialy (see 1) ? I've seen some /tmp access in its source code - does it dowload whole message to /tmp ? Hmm, that's all for now... TIA -=Czaj-nick=-
