** James Courtier-Dutton <james.dutton@???> [2007-09-05 00:34]:
> Has anyone had any experience with the following:
> http://www.dbmail.org/index.php?page=overview
>
> I like the idea of using a database for my email storage.
> It is then easier to do searches and such like.
> I could also add a web interface to interface directly to the database
> instead of using the ancient and slow protocols like imap.
>
> Any pro or cons?
** end quote [James Courtier-Dutton]
Sounds like a similar concept the the Cyrus mail server, which iirc uses
Berkely DB as a backend (now owned by Oracle, but still open source).
Personally I abandoned investigating Cyrus based on the fact that it
stored data in its own 'proprietary' format. That's not saying it isn't
easy to get the data out and migrate to another platform, but it isn't
as easy as uninstalling one IMAP server and installing another - which
was the process I used when I migrated from Courier to Dovecot. No
configuration changes were needed to my Exim install and both IMAP
servers where happy to use the same Maildir directory structure out of
the 'box'.
I guess if you are using a massive scale mail system then the database
backend may improve performance, but I like the simplicity of Maildir
and being able to use grep directly on the mail folder if I want to, as
well as accessing locally via Mutt or remotely via IMAP.
That was my take on the matter some years ago when I first started using
Courier. After a while I got fed up with the Courier attitude of "the
rest of the world is broken, ask them to fix it" to the IMAP definition
(they may well be the only ones doing an accurate implementation, but
how much effort would it be to support the clients that don't -
particularly when 100% of the ones I tested seemed to make the same
'wrong' interpretation - anyhoo!).
--
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