* On 09/06/06 13:07 -0700, Marc Perkel wrote:
| After considerable experimenting and thinking things through I thought
| I'd start a thread on the future of email to start planting the seeds of
| where MTA development needs to go. I'm convinced that someday soon we
| will all realize that MBOX and MAILDIR are obsolete technologies and
| that the future is going to be SQL based storage.
|
| First - before everyone starts screaming about speed comparisons, I'm
| not going to go there. Every storage technology has it's advantages and
| disadvantages but I'm just going to say that SQL based mail storage is
| fast enough. The advantages of SQL has to do with power and not with
| speed. Those who would choose it would do so because they want to do new
| things that you can do with a database and can't do without one.
|
| SQL has several advantages. You don't have t deal with the quirks of the
| underlying file system or OS. It takes care of all the locking issues
| and indexing and makes it so that multiple applications can seamlessly
| access the data. With an SQL backend email can be stored from the MTA,
| read from and IMAP client that accesses the same database, and the spam
| filtering engine will have access to the stored email as well.
|
| To give you some examples of what could be done .....
|
| Suppose a spammer sends 1000 phishing spams to your users and then you
| figure out that the 1000 spams already delivered is spam. With a
| database you can do a query to retroactively delete spam that was
| already delivered to the mailboxes. This could also be used to
| retroactively delete viruses already delivered.
|
| Spam filtering programs can lookup existing email in existing folders
| and compare it with new email already deliverd to help determine more
| accurately if a message is spam or not. For example, if the host server
| has a reputation for 100% ham then it can deliver new email without
| running it through Spam Assassin. If programs like Spamassassin can
| access existing email in existing folders it can evaluate new email
| using tricks no one has yet considered.
|
| SQL databases allow for multiple masters and slaves and replication that
| lets you create a cluster that never fails under any conditions. It
| would be far easier to create a system that is always on and always
| backed up.
|
| An SQL backend allows you to use a wide variety of tools, programming
| languages, operating systems in order for you to easily integrate more
| easily than non database systems.
|
| And - this is important - once you have a database then new things that
| no one has yet thought of will be possible and new things we've never
| heard of will be developed because the new power will lend to the
| development of more tricks than you can do without database power.
|
| My point here is - think outside the box. I'm going to be lobbying IMAP
| server developers to include SQL backends. exim could pipe data into a
| local delivery agent, or it can have features written to write directly
| to the SQL backend.
|
| Thoughts ..... ?
Yes. Just two.
1. You like poking at the hornet's nest.
2. You will cause the 3rd world war (or words!)
3. It's good to have radical thinking only when you can sustain it with
some contributions ;)
4. I hope the flame war is does not spread from the dovecot list to
exim-users.
cheers
- wash
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