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I've said it before and I'll say it again, backup your google docs, gmail while you can... 'coz believe it or not even though I do not have Google+ or Adsense etc in last 2 weeks I've came across "Account has been disabled" screen twice while logging into gmail though somehow after waiting for few minutes both the times i was able log into gmail. And now I'm taking gmail and docs back few times a day to a folder which is being synced with Skydrive.

Gmail : http://www.gmail-backup.com/
Google Docs: http://code.google.com/p/gdocbackup/downloads/list

Though I don't have G+ or Adsense etc, after reading this, Google Deletes Last 7 Years Of User's Digital Life (http://consumerist.com/2011/07/google-deletes-last-7-years-of-users-digital-life-shrugs.html), I've started taking gmail, gdocs backups.

Gmail : http://www.gmail-backup.com/
Google Docs: http://code.google.com/p/gdocbackup/downloads/list

Though the ideal solution would be to have your own domain. I got mine, a .me from Namecheap for $7.49 just a few weeks ago and using it with free Windows Live (http://domains.live.com/) for email (and you can have 500 emails, 25GB Skydrive, 5GB synced storage etc), which I can change anytime I want by changing MX records at Namecheap.

Simple solution: Create a second gmail account to serve as the back up. Always BCC: this account every mail you send from the main account. Auto forward every received mail to this account. Chances of gmail wiping both due to the same glitch is remote. This is likely to be as safe, as reliable as mucking around with imap clients running on some home grown hand-me-down server and cron jobs to take periodic back ups. Far cheaper too.

It's not a bad solution from a non technical perspective, and I applaud your creativity. However, a better and less error prone method is to schedule gmail backup to run nightly on your computer. I call your method error prone because it requires user intervention for every single sent email. This is not good. Any method that requires regular user intervention is bad. However, beyond just backups, the user must review their backed up gmail regularly, which is what google (or any other) calendar is for. Just add an event to remind you to look at your backups and verify they're done (and restoreable or at least readable).

This is *exactly* why I have GMail Backup run nightly

ac

Now my use of the email isn't mandated by my backup requirements.

This is exactly why it's important to keep backups. Gmail Backup is a pretty straightforward way to back up your Gmail account. You can also use it to upload emails from one account into another.

This outage prompted me to look for an easy way to backup my mail. I use the webmail interface, and don't necessarily want to put some time into configuring a mail client that I would not use for backup purposes only.

A google search returned Gmail Backup, apparently designed for the sole purpose of backing up Gmail. I have to wait until I'm home tonight to test it, but I was wondering if by chance some slashdotters would have tested it already. The app seems promissing, but I want to make sure that it's indeed working, as I don't want to find out the backup is crap the day Gmail collapses.

I use http://www.gmail-backup.com/ to backup my gmail accounts. It works with regular gmail and google apps gmail. It has a click and backup view, but I use the cmd line interface to automate a daily backup of all my mail and labels to a folder as .eml files. It also lets you restore to gmail if needed. It has a few quirks, but over all is very useful.