I don't know about you, but around this time of year I usually get a stack of holiday letters from friends and family recapping the year's events. As we head into January 2008, The Mail Archive will turn ten years old so it's time for a decennial report. I started the project as a for fun hobby based on some personal email sorting algorithms. Today, Mail-Archive, Inc. is a financially solid small business with four in-the-black year in a row. The long term outlook looks good. And it is still fun.
This fall I had the opportunity to meet Ben from Ben & Jerry's ice cream. I grew up in Vermont, where Ben and Jerry's pretty much set the example for how to run a business. Amongst other things, they had a policy of supporting good causes with a portion of revenue. Amongst other fond Vermont memories (like falling partway through the ice on Lake Champlain), there was a lot of free ice cream at school events. The Mail Archive has endeavored to follow the same model, and I'm really proud of all the causes we've supported even if it is in a small way. This quarter donations went to buying supplies for underfunded teachers in the US K-12 school system. That means - amongst many other things - your archived messages are indirectly supporting silver nitrate for chemistry experiments, art supplies for Asian brush painting, tuning forks and optics supplies for a science classes, and wall size world maps. Who would have thought? In 1998, The Mail Archive was connected to the internet with a residential cable modem in Murray Hill, New Jersey. The primary server was a dusty old Pentium-90 called multivac. Did I mention it was snowy and we had to walk uphill both ways? I'm just kidding, New Jersey gets a pathetically small amount of snow, and I only walked uphill one way. Today our servers are hooked directly into a 10 gigabit network at a professional data center in Fremont, California. Multivac has been superseded by 7 generations of server hardware, and "gen8" has already been ordered. This year in particular has been fun. The biggest usability improvement was removing advertisements for direct users; hurray! The homepage was revised based on input from a user interface specialist and an entire classroom of students. Behind the scenes infrastructure changes were mostly about speed. Both the HTML renderer (mhonarc) and the sorting engine got faster, reducing archiving latency by over 45%. Uptime was okay but not great; like last year we were significantly better than the famous 99.44% number claimed by Ivory soap but less than the goal of 99.9%. Hopefully we can do better in 2008. We once again had a perfect year in terms of data integrity. That's the general status, I'm happy to answer questions. Big thanks to the team working directly on the service, to the many people who help indirectly, to list administrators, to end users, and especially to grumpy folks who took the time to tell us where improvement was needed. Happy New Year, and here's to another great year ahead. Or ten. Jeff -- To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
