How Mailinator compresses email by 90%

Interesting read - it's always fun to follow other people's thought processes and see how they solved a problem:

Given the title of this article, the first thing that should pop into your mind is probably - "well, use a compression algorithm - right?".

Right! Well, yes, well, not exactly. Read on.

Your second thought might also have been - "Why bother? Just buy more disks." Which in the big picture is also not a bad answer. But for Mailinator that doesn't work - if you have read previous Mailinator tech articles you might know that Mailinator stores all it's email in RAM.

There were good reasons for that when Mailinator started. One was the use case - which was always disposable email that lasts a few hours (rather longer nowadays). Secondly, when Mailinator started, disks and datastores weren't as sophisticated/fast as they are now.

Also, Mailinator is/was always a free service so keeping costs down was always important. To this day, Mailinator runs on a single server. It averages about 4-5Terabytes of bandwidth a month and the peak incoming email rate I've seen is about 3500 emails/sec (this is just a production observation, server limit is bandwidth, not CPU).

More: http://mailinator.blogspot.com/2012/02/ ... by-90.html

Cool! I love this kind of stuff, thanks for posting it.