On Thu, 10 Jun 1999, Bruce Campbell wrote:

	This was my point.  The complaint was that Lord Cyrus uses a
format that you have to read via IMAP or POP.  The benefits *so* outweigh
the costs.

	Cyrus is *not* a flat file, though.  There is a seperate file for
every message, *and* an index to those messages for searching and/or
displaying.  Most of these ideas are not qmail's, though, they're derived
from other systems.

	Although I do believe SCSI would be better here, this isn't really
a ``throw some hardware at it'' kind of problem problem.

// Change the mailbox format.  I had the same problem on a FreeBSD box (with
// 'ahem' 120meg+ mailboxes) until I shifted to an imapd capable of
// supporting maildir format (which qmail and exim deliver to, and pretty
// easy to set up a global procmailrc to fake it under sendmail).
// 
// Standard unix mailbox format is one flat file.  maildir is a seperate file
// for each message, meaning that your imapd (you can pick one up from
// www.qmail.org which (I think) groks mailbox and maildir) doesn't try to
// suck the entire mailbox into memory.  ( Cyrus doesn't do this, but its
// still a flat file )
// 
// Still, if you are really serious about doing mail, a full database
// solution might be the answer.
// 
// --==--
// Bruce.
// 
// (aside, DJB can be annoying, but he does (sometimes) have good ideas ;) )
// 
// 

--
Principal Member Technical Staff, beyond.com    The world is watching America,
pub  1024/3CAE01D5 1994/11/03 Dustin Sallings <dustin@spy.net>
|    Key fingerprint =  87 02 57 08 02 D0 DA D6  C8 0F 3E 65 51 98 D8 BE 
L______________________________________________ and America is watching TV. __