Zin Mail is a full-stack project built using Vue3 on the frontend, Go on the backend, and the ZincSearch database. It allows users to search through a large dataset of 517k emails, providing an efficient and responsive experience.
The project took over a week to complete and was a valuable learning experience. It covers various aspects of web development, from frontend and backend to working with databases and containerization.
The entire application is hosted on AWS, including the frontend, backend, database container, and the email dataset.
Unfortunately, AWS isn't free, so I had to take the project down. You can follow the installation instructions or watch a video demonstration of the app below (Coming soon...).
- Clone this repository using the command
git clone git@github.com:carlosarraes/zinmail.git. - Navigate into the cloned directory using
cd zinmail. - Grant the necessary permissions to the data folder with
chmod a+rwx ./data, as per the instructions in the Zinc Search documentation. This can be found in the Docker section here. - Start the project using
docker compose up -dordocker-compose up -d.
At this point, the project is up and running. However, the database is empty, so we need to populate it. Here's how:
- Navigate into to the data directory in the zinmail folder with
cd data. - Now, you have two options for downloading and unpacking the email data:
- Manually download the emails from the Enron Corpus directly via this link or from Google Drive. Unpack this file into the zinmail/data folder (you should see a new maildir folder. If not, rename the unpacked folder to maildir/).
- Or, use the provided scripts to automate the downloading process. You can grant permission to the script using
chmod +x download_unpack.sh(bash/zsh) orchmod +x download_unpack.fish(fish). These scripts will download and unpack the emails for you. Remember that after the chmod, you need to run the script with./download_unpack.shor./download_unpack.fish.
After the downloading and unpacking processes are complete, you can start the indexer with ./indexer or go run . from the zinmail directory. Please note that this process is quite resource-intensive and may utilize the full processing power of your machine for approximately 2 minutes. It's advisable to avoid using your computer during this time until the indexing process is complete.
The frontend can be viewed at http://localhost:5173.
The frontend of Zin Mail is built using Vue3 with the Composition API, offering a more maintainable and scalable codebase. The application is styled with Tailwind CSS and focuses on desktop screen sizes (best viewed at a width of around 1000px). The frontend handles pagination and allows users to view the full email content with a single click on the view icon.
The backend is built using Go and the Go-chi library. It serves as a service layer that communicates with the ZincSearch database, retrieves data, filters relevant information, and sends it back to the frontend. A profiler (pprof) is also available to analyze the backend's performance and identify areas for improvement.
ZincSearch is an alternative to ElasticSearch, built using Go. The official website can be found here: ZincSearch. To ingest the email dataset into ZincSearch, a Go script was created (located in the data folder). After ingesting the data, the backend communicates with ZincSearch through its endpoints to retrieve the necessary data.
Checking the validation of JSON can be quite expensive in terms of performance. One potential optimization would be to avoid unmarshaling and copying the data directly to an interface. However, this method might not be safe.
Here are some performance metrics for searches with a maximum of 200 results, highlighting enabled, and 14.5k "hey" sent to the API:
| Word | Value (Return) | Runtime |
|---|---|---|
| 'example' | 11,288 | 20 ms |
| 'mutation' | 9 | 3 ms |
| 'mutation, where are you' | 3 | 3 ms |
| 'how are you' | 1,818 | 250 ms |
| 'how are' | 3,388 | 150 ms |