suggestion need to design an email system.

[Adam Tauno Williams]

On Thu, 2008-09-18 at 03:28 -0700, David Lang wrote:
> On Thu, 18 Sep 2008, Adam Tauno Williams wrote:
> > On Wed, 2008-09-17 at 21:12 -0700, David Lang wrote:
> >> On Wed, 17 Sep 2008, Wesley Craig wrote:
> >>> On 17 Sep 2008, at 11:40, Jens Hoffrichter wrote:
> >>>> Why does cyrus need it's own
> >>>> structure for the mailboxes, which is similar, but not wholly
> >>>> compatible, to maildir. Maildir and cyrus both suffer from the same
> >>>> disadvantages (huge needs in terms of inodes etc.), yet I see no
> >>>> distinctive advantage for the cyrus mailbox format to maildir.
> >>> Performance.  I could go on & on, but that's the answer, basically.
> >> actually, I suspect that Cyrus existed before Maildir and since Cyrus is a
> >> 'black box' server there's no advantage to moving to maildir.
> >> Also Cyrus has cache, index, and flags stored seperatly from the message itself,
> >> which means that when these things are changed the message file itself doesn't
> >> need to change.
> > Yep,  which is why the sealed mailstore is a good idea: meta-data.  You
> > can keep reliable meta-data if third parties can go in and muck about.
> one of those "can" should be "can't" :-)

Yep, I mean nope, I mean... :)

Should have been:
<quote>
Yep,  which is why the sealed mailstore is a good idea: meta-data.  You
can't keep reliable meta-data if third parties can go in and muck about
</quote>

Anyway, this is the same reason one puts a web service in front of an
RDBMS (rather than clients connecting directly to the DB).  Three-tier
architectures just facilitate greater consistency and security than
two-tier systems [witness the constant security breaches in many LAMP
applications, not for the same technical reasons maybe, but at least on
one level it is conceptually the same kind of problem].  After a decade
of sys-admin work I've become rather a bigot about this kind of thing.

> >> doign a quick google check on maildir it also appears that maildir is not as
> >> standard as people think it is, it's defined almost entirely by the
> >> implementation (DJB started it, but never worked to turn it into a standard for
> >> others to use)