[Dovecot] Duplicate Attachments....

Jens Laas jens.laas at data.slu.se
Fri Jun 2 09:14:06 EEST 2006


(06.06.01 kl.07:45) Charles Marcus skrev följande till dovecot at dovecot.org:

> Love Dovecot, many thanks for it!
>
> But, I have a question regarding the storing of emails, with respect to 
> efficiency...
>
> Our business model (advertising industry) is such that our users exchange a 
> lot of emails with attachments - most less than a megabyte, but some 
> considerably larger. Consequently, I have been looking for a good, open 
> source imap server that doesn't store multiple copies of the same attachment 
> - but instead, stores a checksum, and whenever a message is stored with a 
> duplicate attachment, the attachment is stored only once, and simply 
> referenced by some kind of link to other emails.
>
> This would *drastically* reduce the storage requirements for our company - 
> imagine a message with a 10MB attachment, sent to 40 of our users, sometimes 
> more than once. Now multiply this by 3 times per day, for 5 years...
>
> Are there any plans for Dovecot to support this type of storage in the 
> future? Does this require the use of an SQL DB for storing the message 
> components?
>

I thought I'd just mention aradis which can extract and replace the 
attachment. The attachment itself can then be delivered to a webserver, 
the filesystem or a custom script.

http://robur.slu.se/jensl/aradis

(I am the author of aradis and we use it mainly for mailinglists.:-)

Cheers,
Jens

> -- 
>
> Best regards,
>
> Charles
>

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