

ElasticInbox – Open Source Distributed Email Store - zheng
http://www.elasticinbox.com/

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Icer5k
Interesting concept, especially with the recent changes Google has made to
GMail/Apps. The biggest benefit/downside that jumps out at me is the
complexity required to run an email system this way - Cassandra clusters,
LDAP, external MTAs, and web severs all need to be managed. Obviously every
email system requires these components to run, but most full-blown systems
handle the relationships between components on their own.

TL;DR - Looks great for large businesses or maybe as a platform for a startup,
but not as a hobbyist project.

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Down_n_Out
I was thinking the exact same thing, I'd love to test it out, but for the
moment (it might change in the future, I'm being hopeful) it's a tad too
complex to setup for even a test ... I will keep an eye on the project though!

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jello4pres
This looks really cool. Have you gotten anybody using it already, and what's
the feedback been like so far?

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zheng
This really does appeal to me, but I wish it didn't rely on Cassandra. That's
a heavy dependency if you would otherwise have no java in your stack which
many mail servers probably wouldn't. It's certainly an interesting departure
from flat files or standard databases though.

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wheaties
Fork it. I'm planning on doing just that.

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ibotty
hmm. email is one of the things that scales extremely good (see dovecot's
directors for a sophisticated but simple way). i don't know why you will need
such a big hammer.

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mvip
Well yes, but they usually rely on traditional storage methods (on disk or via
something like NFS shares). Normally they use sharding based on the mailbox
name and spread it across multiple storage backends.

The only mailserver before this that stepped away from this methodology as far
as I can remember was DBMail, but it suffered from many other issues instead.

Using Blob-store like S3 (with some kind of encryption) combined with a db
with metadata makes a lot of sense to me for this application. Alternatively,
storing it all in something like MongoDB's ReplicaSet would also be
interesting.

Now, if ElasticInbox is the best tool for this is a separate discussion, but
this type of architecture sure is compelling.

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zheng
I'd agree with your comment about the architecture being compelling. Do you
know of any alternatives that are designed with scalability in mind?

