I would like to know about the optimization techniques in email server/storage. Where do i get this information? I understand that gmail and outlook are not open source. But the manner in which they store emails at the server side is a problem that could’ve been dealt with by researchers or programmers already. Have such things been published somewhere? I am not concerned about how email is sent/received/MTA etc. Just concerned abt the way its stored. Wikipedia talks only about transfer protocols but nothing related to storage. Plz point me to some articles.
Thx,
Venu
E-mail can be stored in databases quite efficiently. Alternatively you can store it in the file system (i.e. on the disk) or in the virtual file system which supports storing of metadata. We recently published an article on storing data in different storages.
Outlook uses custom storage, similar to virtual file system.