Implementation cost for receivers
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Joshua Baer
Feb 14, 2011, 9:15:15 PM2/14/11
to Expiring Emails
I was speaker with one of the largest email mailbox providers /
receivers today about the X-Expires header and they brought up the
question of what it would cost to implement this at scale.
Right now, most mail system do not have a process that scans the inbox
for messages to act on. Often the inbox can be quite large.
One option would be to scan the mailboxes once per day. That sounds
really expensive to me though.
Another idea would be to maintain a list of messages that expire which
you log at the time the message is received. The list is indexed by
date and so each night you simple run through the list of messages
that expire today and then follow a pointer to the message so that you
could act on it.
Other thoughts on the best way to implement this?
~Josh
receivers today about the X-Expires header and they brought up the
question of what it would cost to implement this at scale.
Right now, most mail system do not have a process that scans the inbox
for messages to act on. Often the inbox can be quite large.
One option would be to scan the mailboxes once per day. That sounds
really expensive to me though.
Another idea would be to maintain a list of messages that expire which
you log at the time the message is received. The list is indexed by
date and so each night you simple run through the list of messages
that expire today and then follow a pointer to the message so that you
could act on it.
Other thoughts on the best way to implement this?
~Josh
Ian Ragsdale
Feb 14, 2011, 10:15:38 PM2/14/11
to x-ex...@googlegroups.com, Expiring Emails
If disk space isn't really a concern, another option is to not to actively delete them at all, but to filter them out when iterating the mailbox. That means mailbox counts could be an issue, but is almost cost free and easy to implement.
Joshua Baer
Feb 15, 2011, 6:48:33 AM2/15/11
to x-ex...@googlegroups.com
Oh so basically just filter them out at display time. That makes sense.
~Josh
Steve Smith
Feb 15, 2011, 7:21:57 AM2/15/11
to Expiring Emails
That's very interesting. The expires header will still be
computationally expensive to process however you perform the
operation.
Keeping an index makes a lot of sense once you have seen a message
though. You could mark the timestamp of the last message that has been
indexed and then only reprocess the new ones but I don't think there's
any getting around the fact you have to perform this calculation. At
least the headers are the easiest thing to parse.
Steve
On Feb 15, 11:48 am, Joshua Baer <joshuab...@otherinbox.com> wrote:
> Oh so basically just filter them out at display time. That makes sense.
>
> ~Josh
>
computationally expensive to process however you perform the
operation.
Keeping an index makes a lot of sense once you have seen a message
though. You could mark the timestamp of the last message that has been
indexed and then only reprocess the new ones but I don't think there's
any getting around the fact you have to perform this calculation. At
least the headers are the easiest thing to parse.
Steve
On Feb 15, 11:48 am, Joshua Baer <joshuab...@otherinbox.com> wrote:
> Oh so basically just filter them out at display time. That makes sense.
>
> ~Josh
>
> On Feb 14, 2011, at 9:15 PM, Ian Ragsdale <ianragsd...@otherinbox.com> wrote:
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> > If disk space isn't really a concern, another option is to not to actively delete them at all, but to filter them out when iterating the mailbox. That means mailbox counts could be an issue, but is almost cost free and easy to implement.
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> > If disk space isn't really a concern, another option is to not to actively delete them at all, but to filter them out when iterating the mailbox. That means mailbox counts could be an issue, but is almost cost free and easy to implement.
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