Re: DBmail webmail app

On Wed, May 30, 2007, Paul J Stevens <paulnfg.nl> said:

> Peter Rabbitson wrote:
>> Peter Welzien wrote:
>>> Hi. I'm writing a webmail application that
works directly with the
>>> SQL-server.
>> 
>> Actually a question to the authors: Paul, Aaron,
are you as religious
>> about the DBMail internals as Wietse Venema is
about the postfix queue? 

Along a stable branch we don't change the tables because
that creates
nightmares for everyone. So you can be sure that we won't
change the
schema syntactically. You cannot be sure that we don't fix
incorrectly
encoded data or other semantic mistakes with specific
columns being used
wrong, which might lead to some subtle bugs in your client.
 
> Well, I've been known to speak in tongues on this list
from time to
> time. Does that count?
>
>> Joking aside - is the internal format considered
stable enough that such
>> applications are safe to use, and do not risk
destroying some
>> inter-table dependencies? If so (it is stable) is
it documented
>> somewhere/are there plans on documenting it?
> 
> There have been some discussions about cleaning up and
normalizing the
> table and column names. That was meant to accomodate
rails developers.
> But not in 2.2. That is for new branches only. If
you're planning on
> using a ORM toolkit, make sure you don't hardcode the
tables/fields all
> over the place.
> 
> Other than naming, there are very few plans to expand
into new tables.
> The cplog patch (for tracking movement of messages
accross mailfolders)
> shows promise, so in general; new tables are likely
during the 2.3
> cycle. There is also some work in the pipeline to
decouple message flags
> from the messages table. That will allow us to use
different flags for
> the same message when accessed by different users.
> 
> That's about all I can think of right now.

The one major big-bang change we've talked about in the past
has been
separating out message parts and storing each one in its own
block, with a
separate table keeping track of the overall mime structure.

If we do folder annotations we'll have at least one serious
new table. If
we do this at the same time as splitting up the folder and
message flags,
we can put it all in the same table as key-value rows rather
than discrete
columns.

I also really like the idea of running Sieve scripts at
various points in
the delivery chain, with some scripts belonging to the site
admin, some to
the client admin, etc. This will probably require one or two
additional
columns someplace.

Aaron
_______________________________________________
DBmail mailing list
DBmaildbmail.org
htt
ps://mailman.fastxs.nl/mailman/listinfo/dbmail