Re: [Exim] Mail storage formats/ POP/IMAP/webmail daemon/etc…

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Author: Nigel Metheringham
Date:  
To: exim-users
Subject: Re: [Exim] Mail storage formats/ POP/IMAP/webmail daemon/etc..
yann@??? said:
> Again, as no one seems to have said it before, I did a paper on the
> Freeserve mail system (3 millions users to date) which you can find on
> my web pages www.kierun.org/academic/


People may also find Brad Knowle's "Design and Implementation of Highly
Scalable E-mail Systems" interesting. It refs Yann's paper as well as
a good pile of other ones which deal with large mail systems.

His solution is very very different to the Freeserve/Maildir/NFS model.

The presentation can be found at
    http://www.shub-internet.org/brad/papers/dihses/ukuug2001/


The MTA (or rather mail system) review part is also found at
    http://www.shub-internet.org/brad/papers/dihses/mta-review/


It should be noted that Yann's described system does POP retrieval
only. IMAP access to a Maildir mailspool has some interesting problems
all of its own... to the extent where I would want to consider keeping
a hints cache in another file within a maildir (hints in the sense of
you blow it away if there is a problem and rebuild), since the
alternatives are reading every file in a folder to get the header data.

    Nigel.


-- 
[ Nigel Metheringham           Nigel.Metheringham@??? ]
[ Phone: +44 1423 850000                         Fax +44 1423 858866 ]
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