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Date: Tue, 22 Jun 2004 08:31:34 -0400
From: Bill Moran <wmoran@potentialtech.com>
To: Jan Grant <Jan.Grant@bristol.ac.uk>
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Subject: Re: [OT] Re: What's the best possible email failover solution
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Jan Grant <Jan.Grant@bristol.ac.uk> wrote:

> On Mon, 21 Jun 2004, Bill Moran wrote:
> 
> > During my research of the IMAP protocol, I determined that _the_best_
> > way to store email for high-performance would be to put them in a
> > database.  This is because IMAP doesn't see email as a big blob of
> > text like POP does.  It sees the headers as one thing, and the
> > different MIME parts of the email each as a seperate thing that can
> > be fetched independently of the other MIME parts.  This is a pretty
> > good layout for a one -> many relationship in a database.  Fact is,
> > every current IMAP server that I'm aware of has to break emails
> > apart on the fly in order to server IMAP.
> 
> Have a closer look at the cyrus layout. Each message is in a single
> file, true, but they are also preparsed to extract the data required for
> common IMAP operations. The index files contain things like preformed
> bodystructure responses and offsets to each mime piece.

That would explain why Cyrus is so fast then.

If only there was a way to do replication ... it'd be the perfect IMAP
server.

-- 
Bill Moran
Potential Technologies
http://www.potentialtech.com