Re: running Apple Mail on Postgres?

On Dec 17, 2007, at 12:10 PM, Matthew Hixson wrote:

> This may be a tad off topic, but thought a PG enthusiast might have
> some insight on this. Apple Mail sits on top of Sqlite. I was
> wondering if it would be possible to substitute Postgres as the
> underlying database. I do know how to vacuum Sqlite to speed up
> Mail, but with the massive amount of email I have I was wondering if
> Postgres could more easily handle the workload.
> Thanks,

sqlite is (usually) an embedded database. That means a couple of
things - one is that it's not something that you can simply swap out
easily, it's linked into the Mail.app binary. The other is that, for
this particular application (single reader/writer, simple workload)
it's probably quite a lot faster than postgresql would be in theory,
and both would be dominated by disk i/o in practice.

(And if you haven't upgraded to Leopard yet, you should. Mail.app
sucks less on large IMAP boxes than with previous versions.)

If you want to do complex data-mining on email, there are several ways
to pull email into a postgresql database, and then make it available
via IMAP to a standard client. dbmail.org is one that springs to mind,
archiveopteryx another.

Cheers,
Steve