Over the weekend, I decided to finally wrest control from the crap in my Yahoo Inbox. Because of my willingness to sign up for any service, my inbox had escalated from a small number of emails to over 18k unread emails since 2009!
Yahoo’s decision to give unlimited space made this worse, the caps on storage would periodically force me to get a handle on things, and now … well … now the Inbox could just grow and grow and grow…
Given my Inbox dates from pre 2000, more or less when yahoo mail started, this exercise filled me with wonder. Would Yahoo still be able to serve up my email? Would I find curious pauses in my email as I scanned further and further back in time? Would email just disappear? Would those emails from 1999 be gone?
Turns out that Yahoo handled my searches through time wonderfully. And more importantly I was able to find some memorable old emails from my friends from almost 15 years ago.
My inbox was probably initially served off of the original infrastructure that Yahoo made available to customers in the 1990’s. To see the data still being available was impressive. Being able to store and retrieve 15 years of email correctly, given the data center migrations, storage system upgrades, infrastructure upgrades, CEO turmoil is a tribute to the quality of the engineering team at Yahoo.
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