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Old 17th April 2006   #14 (permalink)
BenM
Found the Computer
 
Join Date: Mar 2006
Posts: 12
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Cameron Gray
Learn how routers and transports work and what they are for. The advantage from my point of view is that I bridgehead the POP/IMAP connections which a MySQL mailstore so apart from multiple people accessing the same row (header, content or attachment) it scales rather well.

Also included some rudimentary attachment minimisation on storage, i.e. if the attachments MD5 matches one already stored, just include a pointer rather than store the whole attachment again.
Quite a neat idea. I can see this is potentially quite scalable if you can build a fast enough mysql server, as you can have multiple mail servers feeding into the same database and multiple POP/IMAP servers reading from it. You could do mysql replication as well (although I'm not sure I'd want to, as our experiences with large replicated MySQL databases is they don't always replicate that reliably). Are the POP & IMAP servesr a complete custom job or based on existing ones?

How many man-hours went into building the system?
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