Email, it’s the thing we all take for granted but don’t really think about until… it’s not available.
- We log in with webmail and are confronted with… service unavailable.
- We open the app on our phone and no new messages appear (hmm strange)
- We hit send on our tablet and are presented with a failed to send message.
Inevitably it is always at the worst time.
Our email service is designed from the ground up to be highly available to ensure this does not happen to you. We can’t promise it will never happen, but you can be assured we are continually doing everything we can to make sure your email is always available.
Digging into the tech for those interested we leverage AWS for our cloud infrastructure. TMC email is not just hosted with AWS but rather it is built into AWS. This is known as being a cloud native service.
This means we are improving and updating the service every day. From the many underlying databases, firewalls and operating systems, together with AWS the service is alive and in motion. This is called Continuous Integration (CI) and Continuous Delivery or Deployment (CD).
We operate from two AWS availability zones so if something goes astray with the service it will switch over to the other in milliseconds. (That is techo speak for very quickly) The second zone is generally in the same region (ie: not in a different country) but is on a different power supply, internet connection and is on different hardware.
In addition to offering the service in two places simultaneously we also provide what is called a stateless mailstore. In plain English this means that if we do fail (we are humans and all tech is not perfect) that you will not lose any of your emails. Every email is backed up at the time it arrives in 3 places. Once on the primary which is then replicated to the secondary and then to our backup as a third copy.
Hope you enjoyed this look into how we make your email aways available for you.