It's no problem to store a mail in the database instead of "1" but please think about the size of this file:
2.000 bytes per encrypted PIN mail 1.000.000 users --------------- 2 GB of data some overhead for the organization --------------- --> one single file which is greater than 2GB
From a thechical point of view one so large dbm file will be quite slow,
and I'm not really sure it will be better than several milion of inodes.
The overstress of the fs can be reduced using a fs optimized for fast
inode access, like in linux reiserfs. Using a postgresql server would be much better.
Nevertheless this is better than one directory with one million files. BTW a modern Unix should be able to handle such large files (Solaris, AIX, Linux 2.6 and BSDs should already support this today).
At this point I want to repeat my inital comment - I think it was not really noticed :)
What about creating the "notification" mails on-the-fly when sending them and just put a new status-column in the database's "certificate" table ?
The CRIN text can be stored as additional col in the database to
Oliver -- Diese Nachricht wurde digital unterschrieben oliwel's public key: http://www.oliwel.de/oliwel.crt Basiszertifikat: http://www.ldv.ei.tum.de/page72
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