On Mon, 7 Jan 2002 20:25, Andrew Newton wrote: > Simon Cocking wrote: > >>>Has anyone contemplated modifying Courier to support the storage of > >>>messages in SQL tables rather than Maildirs? > >> > >>Why? Give me a logical reason other than "it sounds cool." > > > > Two words -- replication and redundancy. We already have systems in > > place which make use of replicated MySQL databases for load-balancing > > and redundancy. > > I'll have to admit, it does sound cool. But I can't get much beyond > that point. You can replicate the mail for redundacy to another system > or folder or whatever using a .courier file and maildrop or procmail.
Sure -- getting mail between servers is easy. > It seems to me the ultimate goal is to replicate not just the mail, but > the state of the mail back and forth. *Exactly* :o) > So your message may flow into > server A and then get replicated to server B. Then, the user deletes > half of the messages in a session with server B and those messages get > deleted from server A (hopefully before the user carries out another > session with server A). Does MySQL do all that for you? Yep -- data-altering queries are executed by each server in the pool, so if a message is deleted on one server, it's deleted on all. Same goes for status updates, too -- and it's fast. The beauty of using SQL as a message back-end would be that you could set up an array of SMTP/POP/IMAP servers in a DNS round-robin arrangement, and users could hit any one of them at any time and it would appear to them to be the same server. Need more horsepower? Just add a new server to the pool. Need better availability? Distribute your servers over multiple physical sites with different bandwidth providers. Want centralised stats & reporting? It's all *already* in the database. Plus, user management is just an SQL query away. All without a central point of failure. > Well, to get it into the database, you could just setup a .courier file > to pipe the mail into your sql-loading app. The hard part would be > getting the IMAP and POP servers to look there. And any other > application. The think I like about Maildir is that mutt and other > things also know how to read it. My need is purely IMAP & POP3. Command-line access to mail is not in the picture, although I agree that interfacing filesystem-based mail readers would be a challenge :o) Having said that, at least Pine / Elm support IMAP anyway. -- Simon Cocking <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Network Operations MailGuard Pty. Ltd. -- Message protected by MailGuard: e-mail anti-virus and content filtering. http://www.mailguard.com.au _______________________________________________ courier-users mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe: https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/courier-users
