Of course they could probably write the encoded
message back to the filesystem faster than stuffing it into a table in oracle, but not having access to an
oracle set-up, I have no way of telling. The main problem that I have with webmail is that it stuffs the
mime-encoded message into the db and then pulls it right back out and sends it.
Using the database could be very fast: Oracle can keep the data in cache (i.e., memory) and be able to spit it back out immediately. (If we were talking about Sybase, I'd say "definitely is very fast" because everything goes into cache first. I'm not an Oracle guy, so don't know for sure.)
