email location - files or sql

Shawn Heisey
Fri, 25 Feb 2022 06:01:44 -0000

On 2/22/2022 9:12 AM, Robert Moskowitz wrote:
> What I am seeing is that many of the packages seem to roll the messages
> into some SQL database.? My Dovecot setup uses the
> /home/vmail/doman/../{cur,new,etc} tree structure.

I use dovecot and postfix in conjunction with a postfixadmin database in
mysql.

The emails are stored on the filesystem using Maildir, not in the
database.  Configuration and authentication information for domains and
users are in the database.  Quotas are in the database.  I have several
gigabytes of email between the many accounts and would not want that
stored in a huge database table file.  Although I am sure something
exists that stores messages in a database with dovecot, I have yet to
see it.

While a database would probably be more efficient in terms of disk space
utilization, it would be much less efficient to make incremental
rsync-based backups like I do currently.  I use rsync to copy only
changes rather than the entire archive, and btrfs snapshots for a history.

Thanks,
Shawn