Re: [exim] The Future of Email is SQL

On Fri, 9 Jun 2006, 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.

Oh geez man, you're not going to be banging on about it on this list too?
I thought it had successfully died off in the other place ...

I wonder why you think "we" will "soon" "all" "realize" that text-based
file formats are considered 'obsolete' technologies. They seem to have
done quite well for us for several decades up to now, I'm not sure many
people in the Unix world particularly sees that they are likely to become
obsolete. Especially not "soon".

> My point here is - think outside the box. I'm going to be lobbying IMAP
> server developers to include SQL backends.

Yes, so we've already seen elsewhere. I didn't notice you made much
progress there. There seemed to be an overwhelming opinion against the
idea there, for various reasons, so now you've moved here?

> think outside the box.

Yawn.

> Thoughts ..... ?

How about you just go away and write one of these backends and prove these
ideas of yours?

> exim could pipe data into a local delivery agent,

Spiffing idea. Job done, nothing more to talk about, especially here on
the Exim MTA list. Let us know where we can download your LDA from when
you're done.

Jethro.

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Jethro R Binks
Computing Officer, IT Services
University Of Strathclyde, Glasgow, UK