This morning, when we had processed only 2,147,483,648 emails, everything was fine.

Then the 2,147,483,649th email came in and there just wasn’t any more room (turns out this is the magic maximum value you can express with an “int”).  It was a rough morning for our team. And for those of you that rely on us to bring you email Sane-ity.

However 3 good things happened while we were down:

1) Our design was validated.  New emails continued to be delivered to your Inboxes.  Your historic email continued to be available on your servers. Instead of missing emails, our customers simply experienced what life used to be like before SaneBox – Inboxes full of unimportant stuff.

2) we got so much love on Twitter that it almost made the pain worth it (someone compared SaneBox to electricity – you only notice it when it’s down).

3) as I’m writing this, our machines are converting to a table which can hold 18,446,744,073,709,551,616 entries (that’s called 18 quintillion and to those geeks in the audience it is also called an “unsigned bigint”) which should suffice for the time being!

Thanks to all of our wonderful customers for your support and patience.  We promise to do everything we can for your Inboxes to stay Sane 100% of the time.

– Dmitri