On Tue, 16 Mar 2010, Jim O'Leary wrote:
The mix format dug us out of an approaching performance catastrophe. Three cheers to Mark for developing mix in the nick of time to save our necks!
Thanks everybody for the nice comments. It means a lot to me to know that the efforts were appreciated, especially in light of subsequent events! Not everybody at UW was happy that I fixed the IMAP servers... If you like mix, and are considering using commercial products, I'd like to mention what I've been doing at Messaging Architects. We recently released version 2009.1 of M+Guardian: http://www.messagingarchitects.com/products/m-guardian-email-security.html 2009.1 was a major update, nearly a complete rewrite. It is now the first of our products to use the "foundation" technology that will presently underlie our other products. One of my big efforts for foundation's was the mail store, which uses a greatly expanded version of mix; adding clustering (no more requirement that the IMAP server and mailbox files be located on the same CPU), mailbox metadata, message metadata, and...stubbing!! Currently, we use stubbing (my term for it is "virtual mailboxes") to implement the quarantine in M+Guardian; all quarantined messages go to a mailbox in the global quarantine. The per-user quarantines are virtual mailboxes containing pointers to the data in the global quarantine. However, the stubbing facility is far more general than this; among other things it can be nested (a virtual mailbox can have a pointer into a virtual mailbox). I'll leave it to your imagination how this will be used in our other products... The clustering is also way cool. Between the IMAP server and the mix store is a stateless URI-based protocol (albeit with features to support stateful protocols such as IMAP and POP) and a clustered filesystem. I had my paws in the design of the stateless protocol and was the first to beat(!) hard(!!) on the clustered filesystem. I also wrote a completely new IMAP server that (unlike UW and Panda IMAP) supports ACL. Obviously, this is not just for M+Guardian (an anti-malware, anti-spam, content filtering, and data leak prevention appliance). If you look at our web site, it's not hard to guess how we'll be using foundation in those products. This is all stuff that our customers are using now. There's a lot more neat stuff coming up in the future. My teammates have been quite busy... -- Mark -- http://panda.com/mrc Democracy is two wolves and a sheep deciding what to eat for lunch. Liberty is a well-armed sheep contesting the vote. _______________________________________________ Imap-uw mailing list Imap-uw@u.washington.edu http://mailman2.u.washington.edu/mailman/listinfo/imap-uw
