Aditya <aditya@grot.org> writes:
> Do you know of an open-source/free IMAP client that can use a SQL db as
> it's datastore? I've been meaning to write one for about 2 years now,
> but other things keep coming up (and gmane now has reduced that
> motivation even further).
No, unfortunately, I don't. For both mail and news, not many people use
SQL databases, since for the typical mail and news operations, general SQL
databases are just too slow compared to storage formats written
specifically for the common operations of the protocol. (Note that mbox
files aren't the latter; mbox files are just horrible in all respects.)
I don't think anyone's really worked on providing access to archives using
standard protocols. NNTP software by and large handles it better than
mail software out of the box, since NNTP is by nature somewhat less
transient. Most mail server software is still based on the assumption
that the user is going to suck all their mail down to their local system
at most every few days and then searching will be the problem of their
mail client, although IMAP is changing this very slowly.
But neither have really thought about what would be required to provide
access to a permanent archive spanning years of data. It's a much
different problem with much different standard operations.
(This is one of the common complaints that we get from our users about
IMAP service. If they use our centralized IMAP servers, based on Cyrus,
then all their mail is stored in databases on the server that they don't
have direct access to, and that makes searching for things too painful
because IMAP's search commands just aren't up to snuff yet.)
--
Russ Allbery (rra@stanford.edu) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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