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<article class="doc">
<h1 class="page">Storage</h1>
<div class="sect1">
<h2 id="_overview"><a class="anchor" href="#_overview"></a>Overview</h2>
<div class="sectionbody">
<div class="paragraph">
<p>Email is useful because any one person can send a message to any other person,
anywhere in the world. The heart of email is the ability to transfer some message
based on a commonly-understood message format between two different systems that
may have been developed entirely independently of each other. The concept is relatively
simple, but the fact that email is so ubiquitous is simply a miracle.</p>
</div>
<div class="paragraph">
<p>However, there is more to email than just the transfer of messages.</p>
</div>
<div class="paragraph">
<p>For starters, I want people I know to be able to send me a mail even when
I happen to be out mountain climbing. I want to be able to receive the message
when I&#8217;m not available, then review it afterward when I am back at my desk.
For this reason, email is by design asynchronous. Time can pass between the moment
a mail is sent and the moment it is read.
In the meantime, it needs to be stored somewhere.</p>
</div>
<div class="paragraph">
<p>Additionally, although it is possible to read a message, then discard it, never to be seen again,
it is more common for people to archive a message. Some people even get creative and
use their email for various other purposes, such as a kind of poor man&#8217;s information archive.
Many corporations use email for business purposes, which requires administration of
users within the organization.
Even individuals with a self-hosted email server want to ensure that their system does
not get abused as an <a href="../glossary.html#open_relay" class="page">open relay</a>.</p>
</div>
<div class="paragraph">
<p>All of these types of concerns requires that the system maintain some kind of state,
whether that be the messages themselves, information about the system&#8217;s users,
and even in some cases user credentials. Keeping state requires a storage system.
The system of storage must work intimately with the various
<a href="../protocols/index.html" class="page">protocols</a>.</p>
</div>
<div class="paragraph">
<p>In this section, we describe the two principle types of storage that James manages:</p>
</div>
<div class="ulist">
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<li>
<p><a href="mailbox.html" class="page">Mailboxes</a> for email storage, and</p>
</li>
<li>
<p><a href="users.html" class="page">User Repository</a> for data about Mailbox users.</p>
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