Ok, tell me if this is a totally awful idea, but it seems quite useful to me, even if unusual...
It's a totally awful idea. :-)
Is it practical to implement a mountable filesystem for mail archiving whose contents are served by a MySQL (or other SQL) database? Creating this is surely way beyond my level of expertise in FreeBSD, and maybe even the full design is, but I imagine this much:
The actual supporting database would include category strings for each message (many-to-many). File names in the filesystem would be category strings, so saving an email would file it in that category (to save in several categories, resave to the corresponding names; only one actual copy of the message would be saved).
[ ... ]
Using a database backend for mail storage and to provide fancy searching and the like is the architecture used to build Microsoft Exchange and Lotus Notes.
The advantage is that users gets fancy searching.
The disadvantage is that you need to provide around 4 times as much disk space for a DB-based mailstore as you would for a normal mbox/maildir style representation, you need to provide a lot more server horsepower, you need to continuously maintain and purge old mail from the database, and you end up with your mail buried in database tables, so heaven help you if the database becomes inconsistent and you need to recover.
-- -Chuck
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