Re: Writing a GNOME mail client.

[Alexander Peuchert <peuc peuchert de>]

Hi,

your right. The size of a database containing all mails would be very big.
I also have lots of mails every day.

Another proposal would be to run an IMAP server for mail storage and keep
an local index in the mailclient.

This could also help if you have several computers where you read your
mail. I have the problem that I read mail at home and at the university.
But if I have downloaded the messages at home I can't access them when I'm
at work. If there was a dedicated mail server where I could store all
mails, this problem wouldn't occur.( It's the same with netscape and pine.
If you read mail with netscape, you won't be able to reread it with pine
...)

alex

On Sun, 18 Apr 1999, Scott Wimer wrote:

> 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
> play  --->    scottw@cgibuilder.com         http://www.cgibuilder.com/
> work  --->    scottw@corp.earthlink.net     http://www.earthlink.net/
> 

Alexander Peuchert
mailto:alexander@peuchert.de
http://www.peuchert.de ( not very interesting yet ;-) )