[Discuss] Stalwart E-mail; Was: Re: SSH options

[dsr at randomstring.org (Dan Ritter)]

Steve Litt wrote: 
> To me the dead bang obvious course of action is to keep emails in
> individual files, in a directory tree so that no single subdirectory
> contains more than 1000 files, and then keep a copy of the email's
> subject, date, to, from, cc, bcc, List-ID and full pathname of the email
> in a relational database like Postres or MariaDB. Now you can lightning
> quick look up by all major headers, but still have the email message
> stored as an email file readable from any email client. If you simply
> *must* be able to search bodies, you can have a words table that can be
> joined to the emails table. J Timberlake how heavy is that?


I have an existence proof that 150,000 messages in a Maildir
(just the inbox) on ZFS on SSDs is entirely usable.

I wish I didn't have quite so many existence proofs, but a few
of the people at my company (a) hate sorting email into folders
and (b) have been there 20+ years.

300,000 is currently aggravating on initial readthrough. I don't
actually recommend more than, say, 50,000 messages in a Maildir
(what are you doing that shouldn't be better organized than
that?) but it's all quite doable.

Note that is for a single person's single inbox Maildir; there's
a lot lot more mail on those systems. Which is why replication
becomes important.

-dsr-