> On Sat, 4 Nov 2006, Joel Reicher wrote:
>
> > Just out of curiosity, why is there *any* interest in getting NFS and
> > IMAP interoperate? They both seem to be different solutions to the same
> > problem, i.e. distributed access to storage, but IMAP is
> > application-specific.
>
> It's a easy (if inefficient) way to do horizontal scaling: you have
> several NFS backends and add more to get additional capacity without
> having to touch the existing systems. It used to be fairly common for
> large (multi million user) ISPs to store email on NFS toaster devices,
> even though the only presentation to users was POP and Webmail.
I don't want to nitpick, but POP and webmail are different. Neither
really provide proper distributed access to storage. Webmail provides
distributed access to a mail client, not to the storage, and POP is
really just retrieves and deletes, which isn't FS-like at all IMHO.
The idea that people have just dropped in IMAP as a replacement for or
in addition to these in existing systems would at least provide an
historical answer to my question though. :)
Cheers,
- Joel
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