webmail user mailbox schema design?

From: <meranayaghar_at_yahoo.com>
Date: Fri, 1 May 2009 09:06:18 -0700 (PDT)
Message-ID: <ef978e16-b325-4181-9aa5-4e219798fed2_at_d25g2000prn.googlegroups.com>



Hi Folks,
 Does anyone have any insight into what user mailbox stores look like for yahoo, gmail, hotmail, etc? I am curious if they have, e.g. a mailbox table for each user that contains all their email or whether they have a single large table with email for all users or whether they have a smaller subset of tables with the users distributed between them? Each user can have a large number of messages, so a single table would end up having billions of records (for one of these webmail systems with millions of users) and likewise you wouldn't want separate tables for each user because then you'd have millions of tables. Any thoughts? Thanks.
Sean Received on Fri May 01 2009 - 11:06:18 CDT

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