On Wed, 04 Dec 2002 Amish Munshi wrote :

Hello all,

This mai is for the PRC, I am posting it to ILUG so that I can get comments on this idea.

I would like being a mentor/guide for this idea of mine, I hope that some of you do really like to impliment this and get in touch with me. This is a pretty big project and will require atleast 4 people to participate, I will manage even if there is no prior experince in any programming languages, however I would like if you understand programming atleast. The preffered language for the implimentation of this will be C++, or JAVA. The project goes like this.

Today mailing lists function this way.

A mail is sent to mailing list server and the server tries to send the mail to everyone who has subscribed, this is a very big overhead on the mailing lists servers since for each received mail, it has to send hundreds or thousands of mails all across the globe on the internet, ofcourse many times the deleivary is not completed in the first attempt as well.

There is a very obvious solution to this, is provide a pop account on this very same mailing list server for each member, this is although a good solution is not very practical since multiple copies of a message need to me maintained, one for each member and the memory required on the server will rise exponentially.

The solution that I have though is, the mailing list server maintains a index of all the available messages it has received right from the time the server started functioning, whenever a member wants to receve mails then he can connect to the mailing list server using his normal POP client and the server will respond back using the POP protocol. The server will not have a normal POP server running but will actually be a part of the mailing list software that can provide virtual POP, now for each member of the mailing list there will be a index maintained by the mailing list server. In this index there will be account of the messages that the member has not yet received, only those messges will be given to him as new messages.

[snip] doubts -------- 1.still the server has to maintain all the mails, as it has to make archives, that anyways takes up memory??

2. while maintaining the index no, after sometime this number will scale upto high values and keep growing. after certian amnt of time, the inbuilt datastructures will not be able to hold the no. and thus we will have to store it in a userdefined structure like an array or a linked list...

thats it. although i wont be able work on this project now as i am doing one already! but i can provide help in designing the data structure for the index as am working on something like that...

regards Gurpreet

Gurpreet Singh Student Final Yr Computer Sc. & Engg. --------------------------------------------------------------------- M A K E Y O U R O W N R O A D --------------------------------------------------------------------