Email as a message queue
July 24th, 2012Continuing my thoughts on the continued strengths of email, I throw at the following on Twitter and got a a decent amount of interest:
Here’s a (not so) crazy idea: just use email (SMTP + IMAP) as your internal message queue. Need push? IMAP-IDLE. Need fanout? Add more To’s.
— Peter Robinett (@pr1001) July 24, 2012
I think there really might be actually something to this. Email as system is very well-understood and the clients and servers are quite optimized. I have to say, I’m tempted to whip up a proof-of-concept!
July 25th, 2012 at 10:26 am
I read that tweet 3 times yday and I still don’t know what you mean :-)
July 25th, 2012 at 10:36 am
The Wikipedia article on message queues might help. ;-)
July 26th, 2012 at 3:33 am
Thanks! Peter, you’re talking about ‘internal message queue’ in your tweet, is that in regard to GTD/Todo management, or are you talking about an app?
July 26th, 2012 at 10:14 am
It’s a tool to use inside an app, to communicate among the various distinct parts. For instance, you might have a web portion and another portion that does slow analytics calculations in the background. You need some way to communicate between the two parts and a message queue is a good way to do that, especially if you’re queuing up work for the analytics service.