Building a messaging system

[rfan622]

I'm trying to build a messaging system for an electronic community. So far I have decided to make it all database driven; however I'm debating whether or not making it POP3 centric would be faster.. Is there any type of precedent out there for something like this?

Thanks

[skripty]

I once made a messaging system for a company and i found the fastest way was just to use boring old flat test files. This saves accessing a massive database which accumulates so much data. A couple of text files are much smaller and are faster to access.
What kind of messaging system are you building?

skripty