against databases

[Nathaniel Irons]

Many who've fantasized about building a mail client have probably read Jamie
Zawinski's memo on how to wreck the storage layer, but those who haven't,
enjoy: http://www.jwz.org/doc/mailsum.html
It's a decade old, but I'd argue it's still correct, and that using any
database for primary mail storage is a serious error. That includes sqlite
(a fine choice for a summary cache).

Lest you think that settling on mbox solves anything by itself:
http://www.jwz.org/doc/content-length.html
 He's also got a dynamite threading algorithm.
http://www.jwz.org/doc/threading.html
 Speaking of cantankerous gentlemen who go by their initials, I'm inclined
to think that Mail's scaling success with .emlx proves the viability of
djb's maildir on HFS+: http://cr.yp.to/proto/maildir.html

Maildir is also inordinately Spotlight-friendly.

-nat
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