On Thu, 11 Apr 2002, Jesus Cea Avion wrote: > > At this point, I think the scalability of database mail solutions is > > unproven one way or the other.
There are Oracle-based email solutions. They basically suck, but this isn't an Oracle problem - it's because the coders writing the "Mail Transports" involved are less skilled than an infinite bunch of monkeys with typewriters pounding out Shakespearean sonnets and haven't bothered reading the applicable RFCs before starting (and this goes for Dan Bernstein's Qmail too). Hint: RFC "MUST" = if you don't do this, I'm going to come pound on your ass Hint2: RFC "SHOULD" = if you don't do this, I'm going to come pound on your ass. Where "I" = a large bunch of admins who are pissed off with broken-by-design mail transports (such as qmail) causing DoS attacks on our systems with massive parallel connects, or causing our systems to become bogged down with bogus bounces (Qmail, Groupwise, Notes, Exchange, PostOffice, etc) or causing our systems to back up because the destination system has suddenly decided it will only accept 2 messages per hour from anyone (Exchange, Notes, Groupwise, etc) My personal opinion after evaluating database storage of several tens of millions of variable (but highly similar and short length) message blobs vs hashed filesystem storage is that databases are _not_ suited for this kind of activity. If you're running NT or DOS based systems then this may be different, but for almost all *nix filesystems it holds true. Most of Qpopper's problems stem from trying to cope with people leaving mail on the mail server, simultaneous access from differing IPs or processes (local vs pop3 access, etc) The POP3 protocol is unsuitable for this as it doesn't support switching folders, forcing users to leave everything in the inbox, which then grows to massive size. This is because POP3 wasn't designed with these possibilities in mind. It was and is a _simple_ access method, for a world where access methods are ever-increasingly complex - but only for about 0.1% of the users. If users are doing these things or want to do these things, use IMAP. We'd be switching to it in droves if it was renamed POP4... I'm _not_ slamming Qpopper. It's very good at what it does, but it's not a swiss army knife and we really need to resist the urge to turn it into one. AB
