Re: db-backed mail back end

[jacobs@genehack.org (John S. J. Anderson)]

Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen <larsi@gnus.org> writes:

> If we were to design a mail back end that's supposed to scale to
> several hundred thousands of messages in thousands of groups -- how
> would we do that?  Perhaps somebody has pondered this question
> before.  :-)

I offer a semi-serious answer to your joking question, not because I
think it needs one, but because I'd really like to see this happen and
I don't have the skills to do it myself[1]. 8^)=

There are a couple of emailers out there that exist basically as thin
layers over a DB backend, so it might be informative to pull them
apart and see how they work. Pronto is one, I think.

I would contend (after thinking about it for, oh, 30 seconds) that the
Right Way(tm) would be to have one large table for the mails (with
obvious things normalized out to lookup tables, of course), with a
field or fields allowing arbitrary groupings ("Mailing List:", etc.)
Then "groups" as they currently exist in Gnus become views, searches
become much easier to do, etc.

Apologies if this is all so obvious as to not be worth mentioning...

Oh, and because this seems like a good time to mention it: something
like <http://www.mozilla.org/blue-sky/misc/199805/intertwingle.html>
on a Gnus skeleton would be _*awesome*_. 

john.

Footnotes: 
[1]  And I could acquire them, true, but I'd like it sooner than
     that. So...

-- 
It takes an uncommon mind to think of these things.
              --- Calvin