[tpop3d-discuss]TODO

holmier@inomail.pl holmier at inomail.pl
Sun, 31 Oct 2004 14:54:03 +0100


Hi,

I would like tpop3d to be used in large scale deployment.
To achieve this some thing should be done.

First (i think) new stuff:
 - when designing and using highly avaliable large e-mail system we need    a storage area, it's not a good idea to have mail directories in one     big folder beacuse of I/O disk stress. To avoid this we can use hash     function to divide user maildirs in special directory tree. 
   One of such function is exim's nhash(), it's very simple to use it       when storing mail. The function i very efficent and allow us to       seperate e-mails equal through the directories.
   
   One of the idea is to implement into tpop3d such function.
   As we have mbox, maildir types we could have nhash type, for example
   nhash:/var/mail/$(local_part) would append the proper hash to the       /var/mail, or we could also use /var/mail/$(local_part)@$(domain) to    calculate the hash of the whole e-mail address.

   Another idea is to calculate the hash with php, or other languages       that frontends are based on.
   This is generally used when storing users in databases and the mail      path is retrieved from db.

- Another idea to avoid stat()-ing the size of the single message       (when using maildirs) is to append the exact size of such message into   message file name. Tpop3d would only lookup the list of the files in     the maildir and he would know what is the size of each messages.
  Implementing this in the exim is also trivial.

The good known stuff:

What we need to do else:

 - Bulletins support: doing this by calling perl that executes the 		   external mta that do the delivery is not a good, 		   	   effective idea.

- Recursive maildirs: Recursion in getting mail from maildirs and its 		      sub directories (.dir1, .dir2)

Connection type default message(do not know kow to call it): For 	example: When user connects into 110 and tries to authenticate 	with plain text, he gets all the time the same message(retrieve 	e-mail) with instruction how to use SSL. 



What dou you think about those ideas?

Mc.
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