from Hacker News

ElasticInbox – Open Source Distributed Email Store

by zheng on 3/26/13, 7:28 AM with 8 comments

• by Icer5k on 3/26/13, 8:00 AM

  Interesting concept, especially with the recent changes Google has made to GMail/Apps. The biggest benefit/downside that jumps out at me is the complexity required to run an email system this way - Cassandra clusters, LDAP, external MTAs, and web severs all need to be managed. Obviously every email system requires these components to run, but most full-blown systems handle the relationships between components on their own.

  TL;DR - Looks great for large businesses or maybe as a platform for a startup, but not as a hobbyist project.

• by jello4pres on 3/26/13, 3:30 PM

  This looks really cool. Have you gotten anybody using it already, and what's the feedback been like so far?

• by zheng on 3/26/13, 1:37 PM

  This really does appeal to me, but I wish it didn't rely on Cassandra. That's a heavy dependency if you would otherwise have no java in your stack which many mail servers probably wouldn't. It's certainly an interesting departure from flat files or standard databases though.

• by ibotty on 3/26/13, 8:27 AM

  hmm. email is one of the things that scales extremely good (see dovecot's directors for a sophisticated but simple way). i don't know why you will need such a big hammer.