MBOX-Line: From davidr at imap.cc  Sun Jul 12 14:59:01 2009
To: imap-protocol@u.washington.edu
From: David Rauschenbach <davidr@imap.cc>
Date: Fri Jun  8 12:34:42 2018
Subject: [Imap-protocol] off-topic:  stats on mail duplication,	mailing
	list sizes, etc?
In-Reply-To: <97903.1247435045@parc.com>
References: <97903.1247435045@parc.com>
Message-ID: <4A5A5CA5.6020709@imap.cc>

I don't have stats, but I've done several MIME stores that way. Further 
improvements come from allowing some flags to be stored along with the 
message, while others along with the cross-post record 
(message-to-folder association). And further improvements still come 
from allowing a cross-post header to have some custom headers.

In a MIME store, lots of people forward the same attachment, but in each 
case, the part header as different headers. Some MUAs use a content-type 
"name" attribute field-param to store the file name, others use the 
Content-Disposition "filename" field-param, etc. But in both cases, you 
really want to store the 15 MB zip file attachment just once.

I never worked on optimizing representation of a single mime part in all 
it different varieties of content transfer encoding, versus storing 
decoded and having to encode on the outbound stream, but that would have 
been super fun.

Apple was hiring for a new custom MIME store project for their hosting 
several years back, around 2002-3 I think. That would have been fun.

As for what is profitable, I think Facebook, Twitter, et. al. are 
successfully demonstrating that, en-masse, communication is routing 
around the dinosaur e-mail protocols. Techies like us (especially the 
older and the entrenched) are usually the last to wake up to the new 
reality.

David



Bill Janssen wrote:
> Folks,
>
> Please forgive this somewhat off-topic message.  I'm looking for more
> funding to work on my UpLib IMAP server implementation.  UpLib stores
> all messages in a DB, and uses tags for folders, thus storing only one
> copy of messages that might occur in multiple folders, or are stored by
> multiple users.  I'm interested in figuring some strawman stats about
> email duplication that could be addressed by a site-wide IMAP server.
> For example, how many mailing lists an "average" organization has; the
> average number of users per mailing list; the average message traffic
> (in both messages and bytes) per day, per week, per year.  I know that a
> number of you have actual experience with this.  I'd be grateful for any
> pointers.
>
> Thanks.
>
> Bill
> _______________________________________________
> Imap-protocol mailing list
> Imap-protocol@u.washington.edu
> http://mailman2.u.washington.edu/mailman/listinfo/imap-protocol
>   

