Tuesday, December 9, 2008

MarkMail at One Year: Looking Back

It's now been a little over a year since we launched MarkMail. We've sure come a long way!

We're now seeing well over a million unique visitors every month and more than 5 million page views.

The Googlebot crawler (whose activity isn't included in the above statistics) has also been active. It now crawls between 1.0 and 1.3 million pages every day to keep its index fresh. That's about 15 page hits every second -- or 15 Hertz, enough to make a nice low background rumble noise. It's really enjoyable to get so much Google attention because it wasn't that long ago when we were just trying to get Google to index more than a million of our pages, nevermind crawl that many in a day.

Our content size has grown also, from 4 million messages at launch, covering just the Apache Software Foundation archives, to 34 million messages today, spanning all sorts of communities. For us to grow so big so fast has been possible only because of the community support we've received. There's a long list of various community members who have worked with us to accumulate and load their list archives. We'd like to thank all those folks, as well as the people who placed a MarkMail search box or other MarkMail link on their site or helped spread the word in blogs and emails and tweets.

Looking forward, where do we go from here? We have some big plans. I'll get into details with a later post.