Book Image

Qmail Quickstarter: Install, Set Up and Run your own Email Server

Book Image

Qmail Quickstarter: Install, Set Up and Run your own Email Server

Overview of this book

This book starts with setting up a qmail server and takes you through virtualization, filtering, and other advanced features like hosting multiple domains, mailing lists, and SSL Encryption. Finally, it discusses the log files and how to make qmail work faster. Qmail is a secure, reliable, efficient, simple message transfer agent. It is designed for typical Internet-connected UNIX hosts. Qmail is the second most common SMTP server on the Internet, and has by far the fastest growth of any SMTP server. Qmail's straight-paper-path philosophy guarantees that a message, once accepted into the system, will never be lost. Qmail also optionally supports maildir, a new, super-reliable user mailbox format.
Table of Contents (13 chapters)

Chapter 4. Storing and Retrieving Email

Along with sending and reading email, one of the most popular things to do with email is to store it. The requirements for storing email tend to change over time; sometimes on-disk efficiency is extremely important, sometimes access time, sometimes reliability in a particular environment, or the ability to search through all messages quickly, or something else entirely. There are multiple ways of storing email, each with strengths and weaknesses that make them appropriate for different situations.

Popular Storage Formats

In addressing these different requirements, several ways of storing email (storage formats) have become popular. One of the oldest and least well defined is known as mbox. An mbox-formatted mailbox is a single file containing several messages concatenated together. There are several varieties of mbox formats, and the distinctions between them are primarily in the way each email is distinguished from the next, though there are other...