Speaking of MarkMail: Update

I thought I'd provide a quick progress update on MarkMail.

In a word things are going, well, great.

In the approximately four months since its launch, we've done quite a lot. For example, we started with about 4M emails loaded and indexed; today that's more than doubled to about 8.8M. From memory, I think we had no more than a couple of hundred K pages indexed in Google when we started. Today, we're over 2M.

Traffic continues to grow impressively as well. I've anonymized the attached chart in terms of time frame and scale, but it pretty much shows the trend we're seeing: high traffic growth.

A major driver for deciding which content we load is the open source community itself. For example, over the past few months we've loaded mailing lists about the following projects:

• Xen: 115K messages across 12 lists
  
• Perl: 530K messages across 75 lists
  
• PostgreSQL: 640K messages 30 lists
  
• CodeHaus: 420K messages across 390 lists
• PHP: 700K messages across 23 lists

The above represents a lot of knowledge about these projects that's now about 10x more accessible than it used to be. By the way, in most cases we load these lists either because a community manager or someone in the community asks us to.

Heck, we even loaded some smaller community lists, like eXist, with 24K messages. Somewhere there's some irony in using a MarkLogic-based application to get information on eXist, but we won't go there.

We've even launched an excellent blog entitled, The Making of MarkMail, written by Jason Hunter and Ryan Grimm, where they provide both updates on MarkMail itself (e.g., announcements of new lists and new features) and discuss the lessons they've learned in building an Internet-scale service using XML, XQuery, and MarkLogic Server.

MarkMail gets better because of you. If you've got feedback about the service, a question, and/or want us to add a new list, let us know. Please go here to do so.