Design a Scalable Distributed Email Service

Large-Scale Email System Design

Design a globally distributed email service similar to Gmail, capable of supporting billions of users. The system must handle high-volume write traffic for incoming emails, provide low-latency inbox retrieval, and support full-text search over petabytes of data. Discuss the trade-offs between consistency and availability, the strategy for massive metadata storage versus large attachments, and how to maintain a highly responsive search index under extreme scale.
CassandraS3KafkaRedisElasticsearchCDNOAuth2gRPC
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Design a Scalable Distributed Email Service

Design a global-scale email platform (similar to Gmail) capable of supporting hundreds of millions of daily active users. The system must handle high-throughput email delivery (SMTP), reliable metadata storage, efficient attachment handling, and full-text search. Focus on achieving high durability for message storage, sub-second latency for inbox rendering, and explain the architectural trade-offs between consistency and availability in a distributed environment.
SMTPCassandraS3KafkaElasticSearchRedisSparkKubernetesOAuth2TLS
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