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Re: The future of mailboxes?



On Mon, Aug 14, 2006 at 04:46:39PM +0100, Paul Walker wrote:
> On Mon, Aug 14, 2006 at 10:16:35AM -0400, Derek Martin wrote:
> 
> [snip]
> > stay fast (compared to any file-based format), no matter how many
> > messages you have, as will searching on message headers.  This is a
> > big win for the user.  You'll need to use a database backend which
> 
> You're making the implicit assumption that databases will remain at
> the same speed no matter how much data you pump in or how many rows
> in the tables, and I don't think that's valid...

No, I'm not...  I'm just assuming that it will always be faster than
doing the same operations against a file-based message store,
especially maildir.  And this is pretty much guaranteed.  Besides
which, enterprise databases are designed for precisely what you're
saying isn't valid...  They stay (relatively) fast even with terabytes
of data to query against, thanks to advanced caching techniques and
efficient hashing algorithms.  I can't guess how well free databases
like, say, PostgreSQL would hold up with that amount of data... but I
also don't know anyone who has terabytes of e-mail in their personal
mail store, either. ;-)

> > And, as previously pointed out, this makes implementing virtual
> > folders insanely easy.  That's a Good Thing.
> 
> Still doesn't outweigh the benefits of keeping the mail outside the
> database, IMO, but there we go...

But if you have tools to manipulate the mail any way you want
(presumably using SQL), what difference does the storage format
make?


-- 
Derek D. Martin    http://www.pizzashack.org/   GPG Key ID: 0xDFBEAD02
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