Lavabit Architecture - Creating a Scalable Email Service

Ladar Levison of Lavabit has written an incredible article on how they took a centralized off-the-shelf email server that could handle only few thousand users and built their own custom distributed infrastructure for handling hundreds of thousands of email users.  Lavabit processes 70 gigabytes of data per day, is made up of 26 servers, hosts 260,000 email addresses, and processes 600,000 emails a day. That's a lot of email.

Lavabit's mission has a little edge to it too:

Lavabit was founded as a direct reaction to the larger free e-mail services available. We felt it was possible to create an e-mail service that was fast, reliable, feature rich and didn't achieve profitability by prostituting its user base to marketers.

What I really like about this article is that Lavabit has some challenging elements in dealing with different email protocols while being able to scale to a lot of users. There's more going on than just trying to scale out a database. Many products contain complicated bits like this, so it's interesting to see how Ladar handled them. There are lots of useful details that will help anyone build their own system. Putting in this extra work in is what Ladar thinks makes Lavabit different:

One of the ways to gain an advantage over your competition is to invest the time and money needed to build systems that are better than what is easily available to your competition. It is the custom platform we developed that has allowed us to thrive while many other free email companies either stopped offering their service for free, or shut down altogether.

Since Ladar was so thorough I saved article as a separate html file. Please select the visit link to read the entire article.   I'd like to thank Ladar again for taking the time and making the effort to document their architecture for the benefit of the community at large to learn from.