Re: [exim] The Future of Email is SQL

Mike Wiebeld wrote:
> 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.
>

Yep - that is true. Of course I'm assuming that the backend would be a
really good database. Or - perhaps the headers could be in a database
and the messages stored in files in a way that the database could be
rebuilt. I am just throwing these ideas out there to inspire thought so
that maybe a year or so from now people might be using this idea.