[buro9]

I remember interviewing someone who worked on a DNS platform where IIRC the DNS zone files were propagated by SMTP to DNS servers. The details on this were that there was a 5-minute SLA (I believe) on the loading of zone records, essentially that the DNS servers were polling the mailbox and parsing new records since some last loaded time stamp.

[vidarh]

For a second there I wondered if you'd ever interviewed me (but having looked at your profile: no; I don't think we've met, though I'm in London too).

We had similar-ish constraints. SLA was internal, not imposed (the .name registry had externally imposed SLA's, but the registrar platform did not), but the zones were very simple - either NS records pointing elsewhere, or identical CNAME/MX records, so we needed only a short string per address.

I don't remember if we used CDB files or if we stored individual records directly in ReiserFS filesystems (our mail platform had relied heavily on the ability of ReiserFS to handle vast quantities of tiny files, so were comfortable with that), but it was definitively something simple.

Similar for the web forwarding, which just required a url to redirect to.

If a node should ever need to be replaced, all we'd need to do would be to start a queue on a new box but not process it, then rsync over the dataset from another server, and start processing the queue, and add it into rotation when up to date. If we'd needed stricter consistency guarantees it'd have been a different consideration.

For many types of workloads I'd pick another queuing system today, but the amount of readily available tooling for e-mail, especially once you need federation, reflection/amplification etc. does make it an interesting choice for some things.

It also made debugging the message flow trivial: just add a real mailbox to the cc:....