Chuck Swiger <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> 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 _______________________________________________ [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to "[EMAIL PROTECTED]"
