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MySQL Or pgSQL Drivers For UW IMAP?
Elias Israel asks: "The UW IMAP documentation comes right out and says: keeping mail in a flat file is slow and annoying. Especially if, like me, you get tons of e-mail. I've tried filtering. I've tried archiving. I've tried everything. But the sad fact is that I just have too much email and it takes too long for the IMAP server to do anything because it has to scan each mail file to find the message boundaries. With all of the development that surrounds pgSQL and MySQL, I would have thought that someone would have come up with a c-client driver for one of these freely-available databases, so that you could use something fast and indexed for the back-end of your IMAP server. Even the discussion forum on the UW IMAP information pages is strangely silent on the issue. What gives? Is anyone out there working on it? If not, why not?"
I have to second the use of Cyrus IMAP instead of UW.
I did spend some time working on a MySQL driver for c-client, but IMAP isn't really the right protocol for what I want to do, so I didn't get very far with it.
If you use an IMAP server which supports the maildir format, you'll get most of the efficiency benefits without having to setup a database. I've got qmail + cyrus imap running on an OpenBSD box here with ~35 heavy users (>100MB each, lots of subfolders, checking frequently, etc) and the load average is usually under .05 unless I'm doing something unusual. (The same box is doing NAT and http/https+PHP/MySQL services as well)
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