Design Email Service (like Gmail)
What is an Email Service?
An email service is a platform that enables users to send, receive, store, and manage electronic messages over the internet.
At its core, an email service must handle the reliable delivery of messages between users, store emails for future access, support attachments, and provide search capabilities.
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Modern email services also include spam filtering, labels/folders for organization, and synchronization across multiple devices.
Popular Examples: Gmail, Outlook, Yahoo Mail, ProtonMail
In this chapter, we will explore the high-level design of an email service like Gmail.
This problem combines multiple complex subsystems: messaging protocols, distributed storage, full-text search, and spam detection.
Lets start by clarifying the requirements: