Well, my informal little hackweek is coming to a close today, and it has been really good. The experimental store-sqlite branch is now well and truly merged onto trunk, and I’ve been running it the past couple of days. It’s not managing my personal mail yet, but I will probably switch over this weekend: as well as being a lot more performant, a number of serious issues for IMAP users are now totally gone. You don’t have to worry that too much mail is queued up for you any more, or that your mail filters will crap out because of all the re-processing happening on the server.

There is still plenty of work left to do in the store: currently, it’s missing a few functions needed to support the web UI correctly, but I’m still planning on making a release soon. The release will likely be some kind of server-only release, for those people (like me) who are mainly running it for the SMTP/IMAP loveliness.

Going back to the dogfood; I’ve set up the new trunk on shell.bongo-project.org and it’s running well. I’ve signed up to LKML, a couple of other mailing lists (I was already subscribed to OpenSUSE’s discussion list, which must have been bouncing, so I’ve asked Andy Wafaa to pass on my profuse apologies to their ML admin: if it’s any consolation to him, receiving backed up posts in batches of ~10 simultaneously really helped me debug a locking problem we had!), and at the moment I have a few hundred mails in there from running just over a day. I’ve also been testing with my mailbox backup, which is nearer 10 thousand e-mails, and there isn’t even a slight different in performance.

I would love to see someone test Bongo against some of the mail test harnesses that are out there, so we have some good idea of how large a mailbox we can handle, how many simultaneous mails, etc. I’m really hoping that people will start using Bongo in progressively more serious situations because the widespread testing is the best way of finding a lot of our bugs.