On 02/03/2010 10:58 AM, Scott Ryan wrote:
No capability to store message blobs compressed.
No ability to strip the meta data from the message thus being able to
provide this info to pop3 / IMAP without using disk I/O.
No ability to be able to link 1 attachment to multiple messages.
No ability to move old/read messages to slower/cheaper storage

All this adds up to requiring colossal amounts of high speed,
expensive storage if you want to offer large mailboxes for millions of
users.



I can see your point.

I was just wondering if when you say "mailboxes" you do really mean mailboxes, or maildirs?

Also, i should note that IMHO Qmail-LDAP should focus on the MTA part. There are way better POP and IMAP solutions out there, like Dovecot for instance. If someone asked me about it, i would vote for dropping the POP and IMAP server stuff and concentrate on message acceptance and delivery.

Now about what you think should be supported:

- Compressed message blobs. That's for reading only, right? I'm not aware of compressed files being opened for writting on-the-fly, anywhere. If that's the case, i state my opinion on the above paragraph.

- Where should that metadata be available? Is reading messages stored in single files (maildir), to extract metadata, that much I/O expensive than to keep that data in a database?

- Message/File deduplication. That i would also love to see. Theoretically it's actually rather simple to do. I just need to strip the attachments from the messages and store them somewhere with unique names, like using the md5sum of the file, for instance. Then your message will no longer keep the attachment inside, but a reference to the detached attachment. You would also need to maintain a reference on that attachment so you could know what messages currently depend on it. The other part, of removing orphaned attachments, would be done by the POP/IMAP server.

- Ability to move old/read messages to slower/cheaper storage. That's not the job of an MTA. That would be the job for an IMAP server/system. I believe Dovecot already allows something like that.


Anyone got more ideas/solutions?

Regards,

Hugo Monteiro.

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Hugo Monteiro
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