Question

I am starting work on a mail processing system and while the fields are reasonably clear, not sure of what lengths to define for fields such as email address, subject etc. etc.

of course they can be made ntext in sql server but then you lose some quick search capabilites

looking for some existing schema choices for some ideas to avoid some gotchas

also, are there any header fields that can be used for threaded conversations as in gmail etc. ?

Answer 1

It really depends on your application but I can get the conversation started:

messageId    Int
emailAddress varchar(max)  [translates to varchar(8000)]
subject      varchar(1000) [I think this is the max]
body         varchar(max)  [translates to varchar(8000)]
dateSent     datetime

As far as conversations I haven’t done that before but you could just do it the Microsoft outlook lazy way and just group them by sender and subject. If you need some sort of true parent and child relationship you could have try to build that in your .Net objects by reading the header info of the email and come up w/ some Business Logic using IP addresses or something?