[plug] Virtual email users - storing mail in a database?

[Bernd Felsche]

Craig Ringer <craig at postnewspapers.com.au> writes:

>On Sun, 2005-06-12 at 11:11 +0800, Matthew Lambie wrote:
>> What I'd really like is to have virtual users on virtual domains,
>> ...

>> users and their mail in a (MySQL) database
>        ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

>I only just noticed that bit. I don't do that with Cyrus IMAPd, and I
>don't think it supports it. The feature is sometimes requested on the
>info-cyrus list, but nothing has ever come of it. The usual comments are
>that it'd be both slower and less reliable to do things that way,
>compared to Cyrus's maildir-like indexed mail store.

>Cyrus /does/ however use a mail spool all owned by user 'cyrus' . Access
>control is all done in Cyrus its self using its internal ACLs - there
>are never permissions problems with the mail store. This is probably a
>pretty good alternative to using an RDBMS for mail. It's sure a heck of
>a lot easier to back up when you have eight gigs and growing of mail.

Never mind the horrible abuse of an RDBMS for storing email
messages.  An object-based storage would make far more sense than RDBMS.

But neither really is an improvement over Cyrus storing files in a
suitable filesystem.
-- 
/"\ Bernd Felsche - Innovative Reckoning, Perth, Western Australia
\ /  ASCII ribbon campaign | I'm a .signature virus!
 X   against HTML mail     | Copy me into your ~/.signature
/ \  and postings          | to help me spread!