Linked by Jon Jensen on Tue 26th Aug 2008 02:53 UTC, submitted by Ryan Masters
The Book of IMAP: Building a Mail Server with Courier and Cyrus, by Peer Heinlein and Peer Hartleben, is a quality resource for any serious mail administrator. The approach taken is direct, but at the same time it's very expansive, setting this book apart from most others I have read. It's packed full of rich examples which are used to solidify the topic being covered. At several places the authors reach out to explain when the subject is addressing ambiguous or otherwise undocumented information which is to great advantage to the reader and worthy of recognition.
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RE[2]: My rants with the IMAP protocol and IMAP servers
by Liquidator on Tue 26th Aug 2008 08:48
in reply to "RE: My rants with the IMAP protocol and IMAP servers"
Member since:2007-03-04
I am not sure whether you know what you are talking about.
No comment.
Back to topic. I think the problem you're exposing is that IMAP servers work with *files*. Obviously, email servers would cripple if they had to zip individual small files. And they already cripple just retrieving individual messages. How many times do we get timeout error messages from Squirrelmail when we have too many messages in an IMAP folder? The solution is retrieving relevant messages from a *database*, storing them into a temporary file (single file), zipping this file and sending it to the MUA. This would solve our problem and servers would be happy.
RE[3]: My rants with the IMAP protocol and IMAP servers
by unoengborg on Tue 26th Aug 2008 09:06
in reply to "RE[2]: My rants with the IMAP protocol and IMAP servers"
Member since:2005-07-06
There already are imap servers that use databases,
one of them is archiveopteryx http://www.archiveopteryx.org/
It uses Postgresql for backend storage, this means that you can make use of the extremly quick Postgresql full text search engine to search your mail.
Member since:
2006-11-24
I am not sure whether you know what you are talking about.
Here's is one for you to try on YOUR machine: zip up a few hundred thousand mini-KB files and report back to us how long it took you. Then delete a random 50000 files and ad 70000 new one into that zip-file; then report back and tell us how long that took. Then do your math and let us know what will happen if the server has to do that to any number of people typically accessing their mail at a time... the server would explode