JWZ wrote a great article about choosing between flat files and a database for Netscape Mail: http://www.jwz.org/doc/mailsum.html http://www.jwz.org/doc/mailsu

JWZ wrote a great article about choosing between flat files and a database for Netscape Mail: http://www.jwz.org/doc/mailsum.html http://www.jwz.org/doc/mailsum.html In Netscape 4.0, the new team went both C++ and Database happy, threw away the tightly-tuned mail summary files I had designed, and generally screwed the pooch raw. My code had summary files that were on the order of 2% of the size of the folder they were summarizing, and was blazingly fast in all respects. The 4.0 code had an overhead closer to 30% (last time I checked) and was insanely slow, not to mention extremely fragile: their summary files got corrupted all the time.