Sockets and messaging services

[Kragen Sitaker]

shriek at gmx.co.uk (Stephen) writes:
> Using a mailserver as a messaging platform for middleware ?
> Now that's lateral thinking.  It also screams of "huge hack"

Not really, in my mind.  I spent much of the last two years
implementing publish-and-subscribe messaging middleware.  I ended up
wishing we'd just used a mail server for most of it.

> and I can't imagine it would be as flexible or scalable as a
> proper message queue server.

There are people who have worked hard on making mailservers very
scalable; I haven't used their results, but it isn't evident to me why
mailservers have to be slower than JMS servers.  Can you explain?