Re: The Future of Email is SQL

[Marc Perkel]

Jim C. Nasby wrote: On Fri, Jun 09, 2006 at 02:25:52PM -0600, qqqq wrote: My point here is - think outside the box. I'm going to be lobbying IMAP server developers to include SQL backends. exim could pipe data into a local delivery agent, or it can have features written to write directly to the SQL backend. Thoughts ..... ? Because I am an SQL dummy, I do have this question. Would aps like Mysql and Postgres be able to handle 10,000+ users with an average of 50 MB of email? There are people happily running PostgreSQL with terrabyte databases. It's really a question of how much concurrency you need. One nice thing about databases is they make it possible to do things like partition your tables by month/week/whatever. You can then move older data onto larger partitions that use slower, cheaper drives. Perhaps the headers and other information that you would index be kept in the database and the body of the message stored somewhere else, perhaps even as files. I'm just trying to inspire thought and creativity here btw.