Re: [exim] The Future of Email is SQL

On 6/9/06, Marc Perkel <marc@???> 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.


You might want to look at "Exchange" and "GroupWise". Exchange has had
database driven mailstores since 2000. GroupWise has had them for even
longer.

There are several advantages to that system, but there are also several
problems. The biggest problem is database corruption and losing messages.
Databases require far more maintenance than flat files or directories of
individual files. With a corrupted flat file, I can probably recover the
messages around the corruption. With a database, I would lose more messages.