Re: Writing a GNOME mail client.

[Scott Wimer <scottw dev cgibuilder com>]

On Sun, 18 Apr 1999, Alexander Peuchert wrote:

[ SNIP ]

> Another thing I'd suggest would be some kind of storage database( It's
> already been suggested, but I see this in a more general way. All messages
> go into that database and you can search for new messages, all messages
> from Jon Doe, the messages I sent last friday, all messages concerning
> "email for gnome", an so on.
> 
> alex

The problem with using a dB for message storage is one of wasted space.
Databases provide fast access to data via either computation or space
overhead.  As large as my mailboxes get, and I'm not the only one, I'd
really hate to have even more overhead used to store the messages.

This is why I had earlier recommended using a dB of some sorts to 
index the messages.  This provides the more important features of dB
storage:  
	fast access to individual messages
	fast grouping of messages
	fast ordering of messages
	fast insertions and deletes of messages

And, it does this with relatively minimal space or cpu overhead, since
the dB is only for pointers to mail messages (which would probably be
stored as files in various directories).

We'd want to go with a multiple directory structure so we could avoid
having directories with more than a thousand or so files.  The system
could be designed to be self adjusting though.  I'll send out another
email describing that just as soon as I'm a bit more awake.

Regards,
scottwimer
--
Scott Wimer
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