Chasing Nuts

Reading arslinux today I noticed whiprush mad a comment about Brandon wanting some feedback on e-mail stuff. I decided this is a good time to plug what I think is the best thing since square watermelons!

Every mail system I get my hands on a mail server I set up DBMail. From the dbmail site:

DBMail is made up of several components. A normal MTA (Postfix, SendMail, QMail, Exim) is used for accepting messages. The MTA hands the messages over to dbmail-smtp, using a pipe interface, or dbmail-lmtpd, using LMTP (Local Mail Transport Protocol). These programs take care of delivering the message into the database. Messages can be retreived from the database using dbmail-pop3d, using the POP3 protocol, and dbmail-imapd, using the IMAP4Rev1 protocol.

The whole email is stored in the database. That includes attachments. The DBMail programs do not have to touch the filesystem to retreive or insert emails. User information is also stored in the database, so users do not need an account on the machines DBMail is running on.

All I can say is this system is hella fast and hella scalable. Ever try deleting 10,000 messages off an IMAP account? DBMail does not even break a sweat. Need to add 1000 users? No problem just write a fancy INSERT statement. Want a custom user management web page? Just make some simple Perl pages with a pinch of SQL. The best part of all is if you use PostgreSQL you can put triggers into the database to do anything to an e-mail when it gets inserted.

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 23rd, 2005 at 12:22 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.