Happy New Year! As 2011 ends, it is once again time to look back at The Mail Archive. First, let's talk hardware. We broke the 100 million message barrier this year, which is getting close to the design limit for our current hardware. Next year will almost certainly require a new storage system, although we'll probably wait at least a quarter as supplies continue to recover from the horrific flooding in Thailand. And who knows, maybe 2012 will be the year we finally jump completely to solid state storage. The Mail Archive typically runs at 8X replication, which turned out to be an excellent idea this past week when we lost four (!) copies due to mechanical failure of disk drives. I suspect the reason has to do with one of the failure modes of spinning disks; they seem happy but once they stop moving they don't want to start again. Hence it is not that surprising to lose multiple disks during a reboot. There was some downtime but no data loss, and we end the year with 99.7% uptime.
Next let's cover financials. I'm once again proud of The Mail Archive's donations. This year we helped support the Ada Initiative, which helps women pursue engineering and technology. We donated towards disaster relief in Japan. And we're still picking out the final recipient in these waning hours of 2011. Donations are a fixed portion of advertising revenue, which unfortunately declined this year. For whatever reason, there are fewer visitors coming in from the global search engines. Fortunately, revenue still exceeds the costs of running the service. So if you or your friends have additional lists to archive or import, please go for it. Bottom line is after 13 years The Mail Archive is still going strong, but there is no danger of anyone getting rich. Finally, let's talk about fun events. By far the most challenging import this year was with the IEEE; I almost went crazy in the process but their requested material is successfully online. Big thanks to the patient folks on the IEEE side. Another set of kudos goes to the LibreOffice people; being "difficult" and "demanding" helps keep us on our toes. Thank you. In personal news, I became a father this year, so the majority of sleepless nights had nothing whatsoever to do with email. Finally, one of the charter goals of Mail Archive, Inc. is to have fun, and towards that end the three of us have booked a flight aboard a zeppelin on January 8th. Most of my knowledge about zeppelins comes from Indiana Jones movies, so I'm expecting a lot of excitement. Have a happy and healthy 2012, Mayan Apocalypse or not! -Jeff
