[Dovecot] Using MySQL to store email?

[Jakob Curdes]

>And with great power comes great frustration: Instead of taking 50msec
>to fetch a message, it takes 80msec, and instead of taking 25msec to
>load a message into a mailbox, it now takes 200-500msec!
>  
>
I think the bottom line is that the original poster is very fond of 
MySQL - which is actually a great database, among others. But I fear he 
underestimates the load that a large mailserver would impose on any 
classical database system - many indexes would have to be regenerated 
all the time because with every incoming mail the fundamental data 
changes. I get his idea but fear that storing everything away to SQL is 
the wrong solution; we would end up putting large smtp proxies before 
the server in order to keep it running.
This is a very different situation from a SQL driven http server where 
even in a shop system most data structures and their indexes remain 
constant most of the time. Another point is that it took the community 
years to produce a production-ripe version of a http server with DB 
backend. I think for the dovecot community this is not feasible at the 
moment. If there is a group of people willing to write a sort of plugin 
to support SQL, probably nobody here will object. But in the meantime I 
would like to see this list coming back to the more pressing thing of 
getting 1.0 out & running.

Yours,
Jakob Curdes