G'day Fellow Monks,
I've pre-fixed the title as OT because even for a meditation this is only vaguely perl related. I have been with my present employer for about six months and in this time I have used perl as glue, gaffer, hammer, etc to solve all manner of problems. From simple (yet sophisticated?!?) backup and archiving, various perl addons to squid, workflow enhancements, labor saving scripts, perl has allowed me to do some Great Things(TM). Those of you bored with that slightly sychophant rant can skip to the OT content of the next paragraph....now!

My present dilemma is email, its maintenance, administration and particularly its provision of service to our users. I should point out that this is provided internally, to employees only. Now mail 'security' is a noted issue for our users, not secure=~/uncrackable/ but secure=~/I-deleted-my-2000msg-inbox-why-didnt-YOU-back-it-up/. So to avoid making targeted backups of user's local mail, for most of them - we run IMAP and backup the maildirs on the server. Sadly the existing mail server is groaning under the weight of those 2000msg IMAP mailboxes, whilst I appreciate that.

• Upgrading the server SHOULD alleviate the problem (IO and CPU bondage).
• There is a user-education / attitude-adjustment issue here too.

what concerns me most is that we're expanding, purchasing other business, adding users. IMAP doesn't seem to scale well. More to the point, seeking through a file for a specific message header is un-necessary work IMHO. I metioned this in the CB, and asked if anyone had seen mbox or maildirs implemented as a DB of somekind. Lotus Notes for example (though I am speaking in ignorance) seems to store gobs of data in a DB, not just user-account information (which is what I find most links to when googling for 'mailbox + sql' or suchlike).

Now I feel like the bad guy, either we leave things as they are, allowing service to deteriorate until unusable (BAD). We could place some stricture on mail volume like quotas (BACKLASH?). Lotus Notes has been suggested, but I gather this would mean migrating everyone to a brand new system (BUT-IT-WORKED-THE-OLD-WAY-BACKLASH). I like my idea of sticking with IMAP, but changing the mailbox component to request DB objects rather than grind through a single file grepping for the unique message ID requested. I have no confidence in implementing this myself, even with perl as my spanner.

Phew, reading back I'm not sure about that stream of conciousness, I am meditating my approaches, I hope to invite debate/discussion... I am seeking wisdom but I didn't feel this was quite the ilk of SOPW.

regards , toaster.

I can't believe it's not psellchecked

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