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Lost Gmail Emails and the Future of Web Apps
brajesh writes "Recently some people lost all their Gmail emails and contacts. The problem seems to be contained and fixed, but this incident shows how far are we in terms of moving all communication online on services like Gmail for your domain(beta). Will it ever be possible to do away with desktop solutions like Outlook and Thunderbird? Given the nature of the internet, will it ever be possible to truly move to an 'online desktop'?"
You have the potential of losing email anywhere you store it--it's trading the server for your desktop, in a way. Every new solution used en masse will have new problems. I suppose I'm always a lot more worried about hard drive meltdowns then server problems--someone takes a lot better care of those, or so I'm told.
No one ever loses their data on their PC.
Do we want too? I don't like the idea of somebody besides me having ALL of my data.
The bigger issue is that most email will never be lost anymore and hang around for decades if not longer on a server that the government can easily access any time it wants to with a simple court order (or, in the case of the Bush White House, without a court order).
Subject pretty much says it all.
Because local mailbox file corruption never happens?
I use Gmail for Domains and love it -- we've even been moving customers over to it and they love it.
I still use a POP3 e-mail app to download e-mails for archival purposes or to better format them for printing. I also use POP3 to get my e-mails to my cell phone/PDA (HPC Trinity P3600, best product ever) and it works fine.
I am ready to move to a virtual online desktop TODAY. Anything I need to backup I will -- everything else I'd rather pay someone else to host for me. While graphics design and high-data jobs require me to work locally, almost everything else works just fine remotely. I can see Wordpress evolving to the point that it could compete with Word locally, and I already use Google Spreadsheet for all my spreadsheet work (I've actually removed my office suite entirely as of last week).
As long as it works over my T-Mobile EDGE connection (bigger than a thin client), it is fine with me. Those days are quickly coming that I won't care what OS I am running as long as my browser is compatible with my online desktop.
Personally I don't want any email stored on my computer. Granted, I have enough space for it, but with different breeds of viruses and what not, I'd rather not make provision for them to occupy a single sector.
As to the contacts and emails being lost... Backup, backup, backup! GMail has an export feature.
Those users were victims of a deliberate cross-site scripting attack in Firefox 2.0. If this problem had involved Windows Live Mail and IE7, do you honestly think we'd be using terms like "lost" and dodging the real issue, which is browser security?
Reading through the message threads for this I see a whole lot of people who are complaining vociferously about the "customer service" they aren't getting from a service that is provided to them for free. Fact is, you are *not* a customer until you pay for something. Don't gripe about the free ice cream not being to your liking and don't use free mail services for anything critical. Or maybe even just backup anything you might like to keep. Will we ever be able to implementthese sorts of services as business tols? Sure, and we will pay for that service too (which will include backups and other assurances).
Laborare Est Orare
Gmail is still in beta, isn't it, so I hope no one was using it for anything critical. Furthermore, keeping your emails online with services like Google or Yahoo is probably safer overall, even after this incident, than trusting your own hard drive and personal backup.
The problem is that GMail isn't backing up the data, or are unwilling to restore it.
Nothing magical here, whether its on a desktop or a server, lost data is lost data, and we have known since the first punch card and paper tape how to mitigate the damage caused by lost data.
What it does go to show is that despite the massive hardware investment, the drive arrays, RAID systems, etc., data is still vulnerable to good old fashioned software bugs.
What needs to be done beyond actually fixing the bug is for Google to come out with an assurance that folks will be able to restore potentially lost data in the event that something like this ever happens again, otherwise there's clearly no good reason to store anything important on GMail.
I think that is the direction that joe average wants the internet to go. He wants to upload and save all his pics to the net, have all his e-mails accessable via the web from anywhere. He wants his bills e-mailed to him and he wants his banking online. He also likes the idea of accessing his phone messages via his computer.
The traditional desktop was never by choice I dont think. It evolved this way because of technological limitations, lets be honest. If it were from pure design it would be no bigger than a note pad. So my point is yes it will be a reality it's just a matter of companies investing in gurantees. As opposed to just selling a hot service without really backing it up. This applies not only to e-mail but to online sales (security), storage services like flicker and utube (bandwidth and up time).
I don't get it -- I've used email for more than a decade now, and I've never used an app like outlook or thunderbird. From Yahoo to GMail, and on and on. Who uses things like Outlook outside of a corporate setting, anyway?
It is by my will alone my thoughts acquire motion; it is by the juice of the coffee bean that the thoughts acquire speed
You can use POP (google cache link, the original seems to be missing) to back up your Gmail mail....Anyone have a alternate method that they use?
>> "What would the robut do? Frame someone!"
not likely, given that most companies don't have a real clue about either integrity or service
as well, why?
that is, what is gained by offsite apps? please explain as i've yet to hear a single compelling reason
if online provider would take some responsibility for users material, he'd have the local desktop beat by a mile
'dude, we lost all your email. please accept this $50k check along with our apologies in exchange for your signature...'
beats the hell out of
'tough shit dude, the contract says that once you unwrap it, it's your's. consider yourself lucky that it worked at all...'
One of the wisest mantras of the digital lifestyle is "Always backup your data".
What use is moving everything online if you cannot backup your stuff. Gmail at least allows for this via their POP3 access, but so many other Web 2.0 sites have no such provision. If you let someone else handle your data, and don't keep a backup for yourself, you have no excuse when it disappears.
... why would we really want to move to an online desktop in the first place? The PC revolution moved us away from a mainframe/terminal environment. Why would we want to move back to a similiar model?
Eviscerati.Org: All Hail the Eviscerati
What part of "beta" did everyone miss?
Since GMail is the only email application I've used that so far has controlled spam effectively I'm keeping going with it - though I do pop mails from my account into Thunderbird too (since it's beta and I have occasionally had difficulty reaching it).
Bearing in mind the spam deluge we are all suffering from, is a better question not: "will we ever find a suitable replacement for email - and when? Tomorrow's fine by me, I'm ready to ditch email right now, today.
There are people claiming that they received e-mail stating that it was a malicious attack. I'm guessing that it's just some pranksters jumping on the bandwagon, but who knows. Others are claiming that Firefox 2 had a scripting vulnerability which led to this problem.
mandelbr0t
"Please describe the scientific nature of the 'whammy'" - Agent Scully
if your boss canned you via email, you can always claim you never got the message.
Monstar L
The "fixed" link did NOT say the problem was fixed, only that it was contained to "around 60" users. The article implied the root problem was "fixed" but that doesn't count.
The article's "fix" was to "do whatever we could to restore as much of the users' accounts as we could. We've also reached out to the people who were affected to apologize and to work with them to restore the email from any personal backup they might have."
Unless they were able to fully restore all email at their end, it's not a fix.
Will anyone ever need more than 128kb? If we stopped development because of "What if's" we would never advance. Fortunatly Google fixed the mistake and continued on improving thier product.
"will it ever be possible to truly move to an 'online desktop'?""
Probably for a while, but that's stupid. Server functions will migrate to your desktop. Many of us have already done this. The rest of you folks are called "Windows users".
Need Mercedes parts ?
Absolutely. But that doesn't necessarily make it a good (or bad) idea.
Personally, I don't like the idea of my entire digital "memoirs" being elsewhere where anything can happen to them. Now, it's not a rational fear -- Google has a datacenter, and I'm tapping this out on a five-year-old Athlon T-bird (newer HDs, however). But if something goes wrong here, I have full control. I know the routines for extracting data off of a dead drive. They've spent money to ensure that the likelihood of failure is much, much lower than my old little desktop, but if something goes wrong there, I have no control. Again, not a rational fear -- they're much more skilled than I am at recovering my data. But they're also not going to stay up until 3am just for old e-mails to my family from when I was a freshman in college.
I think one of the things I dislike about Web 2.0 most of all is the fact that all my data is elsewhere. There's a lot to be said for ownership and control. I have no problem with distributed applications, but I want my crucial data no more than 100 feet away.
Pfft... real men use /usr/bin/mail with mbox. Without file locking. And on an NFS share.
I think this may be a /. first - not even the submitter could be bothered to RTFA before commenting.
will probably never move to an online desktop. (bet you were expecting something about overlords)
(1) I don't want my personal data on another person or groups computer, especially without an option of having my own baackup of all my data. Even with the latter, I'd be leary, but the latter hasn't even happened yet in many cases, so I'm not expecting it to happen soon.
(2) An online storehouse like that would be a hackers dream. I'm not likely to have anything majorly secure on my system, but nonethelless, I'd rather remain a small unimportant target (my PC), than a large glowing beacon of temptation (remote server housing a lot of people's data).
(3) Occasionally ISPs have trouble. I've not seen this with my ISP yet, but I've known a lot of people who have had 4-24 hour downtimes. I don't want to loose access to my documents/data if that ever happens with my ISP.
(4) I don't have to deal with slower (compared to hard drive access) network connections and stressed servers making things slow when I'm using my computer.
(5) If I'm travelling around, and using my notebook, I don't want to have to worry about my documents not being available when I go somewhere that may not have internet access. Kein danke.
I understand 4 can be handled, and so can parts of 2, but I am really *not* keen on using an online desktop except for thnings that are naturally net-dependant anyway (such as email).
34486853790
Connection too slow for X forwarding? Try "ssh -CX user@host"
How about a poignant writeup of somebody who's hard drive failed and who hadn't made any backups and who thus lost all of their email and contacts?
The fact of the matter is, data is data, and it's always vulnerable to loss. Frankly, Google does a better job backing up and insuring things than most, but even they aren't perfect. You'd be a fool to trust important information to be in one place alone. Redunancy and backups are key, "web apps" or no.
...whatever you mean by that. This is about control over my stuff. Or rather perception of control. I am a control freak. Almost. And I am not alone. I had an issue with using software like Outlook in the first place (file format and such) because I may lose access to my archive. Now someone is trying to convince me to give up yet more control. Thanks, but no, thanks. My willingness to trade this control for release from my responsibilities (for taking care of my stuff) only goes that far.
I hope and expect the on-line desktop to be as successful as Java-station (or whatever it was called).
-m-
I would like to die like my grandfather did - sleeping. And not screaming in terror, like his passengers.
People with desktops need offsite backup to preserve their data. People with web apps need onsite backup, or "othersite" backup. This is certainly one of the reasons I don't like the web app thing so much. It's no big deal for me to ZIP or tar-gzip my desktop data, and transfer it someplace. Pulling down data from some of these web apps in a standard format is less straightforward. So. These things really ought to have a "download all your data" option. Not sure what format you'd want to use. For Gmail, maybe Berkely DB format would be sufficient.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
First, this loss of data by Google doesn't say much about the online vs. desktop storage debate. Chances are that less people have lost email through this recent gmail foul-up than who lost their email because their own computer crashed. It's just that now there's someone to point the finger at.
Aside from that, though, I don't see that online will replace desktop in the foreseeable future -- there's too many things that are cumbersome to do online (like music and video editing) and way too many things that I wouldn't want in someone else's hands. The former might be fixed when we get consistent gigabit broadband (though maybe not if video quality and speed expectation continues to increase), but the latter, I don't know. There's certain things I create that I want to keep to myself.
Cheers.
Given the nature of the internet, will it ever be possible to truly move to an 'online desktop'?"
Sure - As long as the server lives in my home office.
A decade ago I actually had such a setup for a few years, until my ISP decided to actually enforce the vague and arguably impossible "no servers" rule in their TOS. My email went to my home machine, which I could check by SSH'ing in from anywhere in the world. If I needed a file, I could tunnel in, mount a share off my home fileserver, and do whatever I wanted.
XP has actually made that more doable, in that Remote Desktop works pretty damned well even over slow connections. So now I have access to GUI-only information as well (yeah yeah, I used to do VNC or remote X desktops, but even over a broadband connection those crawl, and don't (directly) support sharing any non-GUI resources such as files, printers, and sound).
The problem here comes from our ISPs, who want to sell us something then have us never use it, whether our already meagre upstream bandwidth, or unwritten but strictly enforced monthly caps (*cough* Verizon *cough*). Never forget, in the heat of all the debate on the subject, that "net neutrality" only applies to big companies who view us as consumers of content. We small-scale end users have never enjoyed neutrality.
So to answer the question - We can truly move to an "online" desktop just as soon as enough of us force the ISPs to let us use the bandwidth we pay for however the hell we want. Not before.
I use both. I use a local email client that uses POP3 and SMTP with GMail. I have all of my mail still on GMail, and I also have it locally. Sometimes it is nice to be able to google my email when I have searches to make. But I much prefer to use an email client and have all of my email available to me offline. Joe
When a man lies he murders a part of the world.
I think it's absolutely possible. But I think a synchronizing system like .Mac uses makes more sense. In the event that you are unable to connect to the internet service (you're down / they're down / ...) you still have everything from your last synchronization. And this also provides even more backups of your important data.
No sig for you. YOU GET NO SIG!
Back in Feb '05, I discovered all of my January mail disappeared. Gmail support was completely f'n useless. They couldn't/wouldn't share any info about how it might have happened.. At that time I was mostly testing gmail but now I have crud in there I'd like to retain.. I was hoping these problems were behind them.
Their final reply before completely ignoring me:
> Hello,
>
> Thank you for your reply.
>
> We have completed a thorough investigation of your Gmail account, and can
> confirm that a technical problem did not cause the behavior you reported.
> We apologize for any inconvenience you might have experienced.
>
> Sincerely,
>
> The Gmail Team
Your "control" is an illusion, and the potential to lose your data is just as real. In fact, a service org probably has RAIDed drives and automated and offsite backup systems superior to what most people are doing on thier own... if they're doing it at all.
In your case you may "think" you're in control, when in fact your last backup copied over the same corrupted data, your archive DVD is now unreadable, and your last full offsite backup is two months old.
Any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.
I'm a network admin for a company of about 45 people. We recently moved from a hosted exchange service (costing us about $700us a month), to gmail for your domain, and it works great.
Given how many people loose all their email per year on services like Hotmail, Gmail, Yahoo, etc, the chances of anything happening are almost slim to none. Sure, bad things can happen, but bad things can happen with any type of email system you use. Not to mention, saving us almost $10,000US per year is a big plus, and a fraction of that can go towards occasionally backing up gmail (via POP download).
Personally, I think this is a whole lot of hype about nothing. And as people have said, it's 'BETA'. Anyone who chooses to use it and rely on it should be aware of the risks. At my company, we are keenly aware that at any point in time, we could get an email from Google saying 'We're discontinuing GAFYD, your email service will be shit down in 24 hours'. However, all risks considered, we're willing to mitigate that chance in foresight of google doing very well, which it is.
I trust that my data is safer on google's servers than at home on my hard drive...
It isn't necessary to completely move to an 'online' desktop. Desktops as we know them now have their place, they have their own significant advantages, and I am sure that with time we will all be using both. A lot of people can't imagine an "online desktop," but the next batch of netizens will probably already be accustomed to the idea, and will use it, alongside a traditional desktop OS, be it a linux distro, Mac's OS, or Windows. As for losing all yours emails, shit happens. Anything you have any use for should be: a) copied to own harddrive b) if important enough, printed out
The online OS will never really take off, IMHO... Browser apps are slow.
But, while I use gmail, and didn't have any issues... -
I'm leery about one company having all my data.
You KNOW google is a massive data center with all of our personal information.
Who says they can't bought? Or the government can't twist google's arm?
And why do I want marketing execs knowing when I use my computer and how exactly I use it.
PRIVACY is my number one concern. Which is probably why I'll stop using gmail. It's a great service, don't get me wrong, and the google products are functional and work well. I will continue to use privoxy/tor and try to find a more anonymous email server. Or, ignore email all together and go back to tin cans and a string.
Dude please stop smoking crack. You will tell me that you never heard of someone who lost his HD? I say bullshit.
Right- in a business-type environment any admin worth his salt would have his exchange (or whatever) server backed up, in RAID5, etc. However, Google doesn't bother with that. They admit that when an email (or everything in your mailbox) is gone, its gone.
"Recently some people lost all their files on their hard drives. The problem seems to be contained and fixed, but this incident shows how far are we in terms of decentralizing all document storage to devicees like personal computers. Will it ever be possible to do away with mainframe solutions? Given the nature of the desktop computer, will it ever be possible to truly move to a 'desktop desktop'?"
I am not in favor of putting any of my information "online". I don't move around nor do I need access to my information from remote locations. I have over 15 years of back emails that I maintain on my machine for reference and search. I want "control" over my information. I do not want it in the hands of someone else.
Will it ever be possible to do away with desktop solutions like Outlook and Thunderbird?
WTF is wrong with a desktop solution? Our client systems are every bit as powerful as the servers, so why can't we use some of that power to provide a responsive and consistant user interface? Quad core laptops are coming, but to hear the way you guys speak, all the processing power should only be used for rendering crappy flash animations.
Don't replace the desktop with a browser. Replace it with a better desktop.
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
And all the people who rave about gmail being as secure as your PC blatantly ignore the fact that IMAP emails are stored _both_ on your PC and the server. And you don't have to watch ads. And you can use a multitude of features of your email client.
You can not directly control the computer or the programs that it runs. You merely interact with it. Your idea of control is an illusion. With snail-mail you have paper, you can directly control that paper. With e-mail the computer has bits and bytes, you have what it shows you.
FreeBSD: The Power to Serve!
That is true in the sense of completely losing or corrupting your data. The other edge of the sword is access to your data. When systems go down, and you can't get to your Gmail or other remote hosted account or service, who can you really call? You are stuck. If all I need is a phone number or photo that I stored a year ago, I can always grab my DVD backup of my email or images and use it. If your online service is gone or the internet access is failing, you are completely locked out of your data. I also use and mostly trust Gmail. That said, I had a situation in the past where I needed to call an important someone back at a certain time, and the phone number was in an email stored on a web email site (not Gmail). This site conveniently went down for some un-scheduled maintenance or something for a few hours. Yes, I should have written the number down, but the moral is when you put your trust in services where there is no real recourse when they mess up, you need to make the effort to backup the critical online information as well to ensure that you maintain access to it.
The nice thing about GMail is that having your email on the server, and having it on your desktop, are not mutually exclusive. It's trivial, if you know what you're doing, to set up your GMail account so that it's always backed up to a local machine. There are even step by step instructions for doing it. You just set up a POP connection and suck down your entire mailfile, and then set up your local mailreader to download the new ones periodically.
Google rightly doesn't make any QoS promises, because it's giving you a free service. However, it's a pretty good bang for the (lack of) buck; and it doesn't preclude you from doing things to protect your data on your end. Until Google came along, I don't think most free webmail services let you have this level of desktop/web-service cooperation. (Though I think Yahoo's mail does POP access now. Not sure about Hotmail.)
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
I would not call it an 'illusion'. For one reason or another, enthusiasts of on-line services assume their detractors to be technologically inept bozos. That is short sighted. The matter is that I can (and I am forced) to take steps to ensure the security of my data. And I alone am to blame if I fail to do so. There is definitely something to what you wrote. I did realize that when I wrote my post. This is what 'perception of control' was supposed to mean.
Please realize that my arguments against the 'google desktop' are not technical. And not even relate to that company's level of service (even though there is something to be said about it; but this is a beta, so no matter). They are on the level of perception, not the net result (and on a large scale). In a way this is similar to the 'airplane effect'. Everybody knows that overall air travel is way safer then driving. Still, plane crashes are way more publicized then car accidents. And great many people (including seasoned travelers) get an uneasy feeling boarding a plane, while getting into their cars every morning without giving risks they are taking any thought. Why so? I believe the root cause to be the perception of control. Or, as you preferred to call it, an 'illusion'.
-m-
I would like to die like my grandfather did - sleeping. And not screaming in terror, like his passengers.
Its safer to fly than it is to drive, but if the plane crashes your almost certainly going to die. Having google handle your mail and address books is certainly safer than storing them on your personal computer (most windows users I know reload their system almost every year), but when google loses your information-- your not getting it back.
Amazing! It turns out that there is a risk that data might be lost when the systems storing it fail. Indded, this is a remarkable revelation.
People need to get real. There is no magic with any service. Faults occur and mistakes are made. If anything, your data is safer with Google than anyone else because they know how to properly deal with huge volumes of data and how to preserve it correctly. Many service providers and most home users have no clue how to survive data loss and client applications that store mails on your disk do little to improve reliability in the absense of redundancy and backups.
To tangentally plug Apple, I am looking forward to Time Machine on Mac OS X 10.5 which uses the copy-on-write features of ZFS to provide incremental backups.
Why bother.
My wife and I tried switching our mx records to using gmail for your site. For some reason, I had no problems sending/receiving email (at least, as far as I could tell) but my wife couldn't receive anything and any msg she tried to send went into the ether. When I checked the support FAQ, it was listed as a "known issue." Needless to say, we changed the records back within a few days. I don't know if anything has been done to make the issue go away in a rock-solid manner, but it doesn't sound like it.
Bark less. Wag more.
Thank you for enlightening me. I really appreciate your insight.
-m-
I would like to die like my grandfather did - sleeping. And not screaming in terror, like his passengers.
I have a personal domain and use my Gmail account (for my resume) to forward to that domain.
Heck, if I wanted to "backup", magically, I could forward to a gmailbackup@foo.bar.
I have always used my email as a "get, respond, keep" with a "never archive" mindset. Anything legal or really important, I'll file offline.
It's ALL about control. For instance, Microsoft would love to make an OS that you rent rather than buy. Moving large portions of the software industry to a rental model is a software shop's wet dream, and Web Apps are a perfect way to introduce and enforce such a model. What happens when they have your data and the (proprietary) applications to read/write/process that data? Do you think the cost of software will go up or down with their increased leverage? "Okay, you don't want to pay anymore for using Enumerate(c)? That's fine, we'll send you your binary data files in a few months or so. Have fun getting the data out of them." You know how just about every EULA under the sun makes it clear that the software has, essentially, no guarantee as to performance? If web apps have the same lack of guarantee, what leverage do you have if you want to switch to a different software provider? It's the best form of lock-in yet devised.
Of course, people will argue that, 'Of course, we'll still keep local backups', or 'Our computers will not be THAT thin of a client'. Sure they will. Until the killer app comes out that there IS no local version of; Google is making tentative steps in that direction. That's the whole point of FOSS, particularly open document standards - so you, as a user of that data, have the leverage to pick and choose a different software provider, or write code yourself, or hire someone to do it from scratch, to access that data. I have little interest in contributing/participating in a software model that reduces the limited control I have today.
I see you've never lost a letter sent through the postal service. Good for you. Will you be contacting Guinness and Ripley's, or shall I?
A programmer or an administrator has the possibility of much more control over his or her email than a person dropping a scrap of paper in a steel box.
Of course, any idea of absolute control over anything is misguided and even a bit silly. You don't have absolute control over your own body. If you did, you'd never get sick. You probably don't have absolute control over your own mind, either.
For those of you who think you do have complete control over your own mind, here's a thought for you: Danny DeVito outside on a cold day wearing nothing but some peanut butter and a smile. See? If you really had complete control over your mind, you probably wouldn't have pictured that visually.
I not only think it is possible to move to online operating systems, but think that eventually it could be required. It might take quite awhile, but eventually... Yeah. You have an equal (or greater) risk of corrupting your email archives in Outlook, Thunder Bird, Outlook Express, etc, and losing your mail. What about the very common Windows crash where you're stuck formatting your drive? Or, what about hard drive failure itself? There are about 27397139719 different ways a standard computer user can mess up their local mail systems. Then you have a good 2% (or less) of all people in the world who actually do backups... I fully believe and encourage web based applications, well beyond email. It is nice to know my email is on a server where if there is a power outage at my home, I can still access it with a laptop and wireless because Google is not going to have a power outage. It is nice to know that if my hard drive blows up, I can get my mail online. If my entire OS was that way, well, then great! I do think that a company like Google should be performing daily backups, or mirrored images of users email... So long as systems like that are in place, then why not take advantage of a web OS and web mail? Not sure what to think in this case, but accidents do happen. People lost e-mail. Nothing is perfect, and it happens every day, all over the world. If you're putting all your trust in computers, and your email is that critical - then BACK IT UP. G-mail makes this easy to accomplish. This has nothing to do with; "how far are we in terms of moving all communication online" - It has everything to do with technology, as a whole. It shows computers, and people, and yes, even god (Google) is not perfect. It shows that if you have critical information, then consider it as such and back it up.
I already converted to using only online mail a long time ago. It used to be hotmail. Now it is mixed with gmail.
I haven't lost any email and I trust gmail much more to do proper backups than myself. That said, most of the email is transient. It's nice to save it, but most of the time, personal email is not critical to keep. Obviously corporations are a bit different. The only things I do try to keep a personal copy of are documents, pictures.... Pictures/documents, I'll burn to a cd or upload to a website. Other common stuff, I keep backed up on a usb stick.
Security wise. Theres some concerns; but I'm willing to sacrifice a bit of that for the convenience.
My biggest concern with services like gmail is that it is "Free". As soon as that comes into picture (free-ness), all liability (of the service provider) towards data Integrity and security fly out of the window. Sure, gmail is SSL-enabled and in that context it is free.
What about data storage? How does google backup and archive it's data? They said data will be available forever. How does that work?
If data storage (backups) hadn't been poor, there wouldn't have been complete loss of someone's mailbox and contacts.
When you pay someone for a service (usually a service for something you consider critical), you are binding that vendor and yourself into a legal contract and the vendor is liable to pay a penalty (in some form) in case of a breach. In short, if there is no contract, there is no assurance of Quality of Service.
Will it ever be possible to do away with desktop solutions like Outlook and Thunderbird?
:-) So, at least for me, and comparing with Google's server redundancy and backup procedures, I'm saving myself from a hell of a lot of work and it clearly feels like a storage safety upgrade for me. I'm betting the same holds true for the vast majority of users, since it's still not common to work with data redundancy and your data in geographically different locations with well-designed backup procedures, like Google has.
Well, I have, at home at least...
I use Gmail, and sure, there was a problem, but as the story said, it should have been solved by now.
One may ask why one would be willing to trust Gmail in not crashing or deleting your mail, but on the other hand, having this happened for the first known time, after all these years since the service went only, with all their hundreds of thousands of registered users, it's obvious that Google has less problems than I have had with crashing hard drives and maintaining backups.
One might wonder what happens in the future with Gmail though, but at the same time, it's not like I'm stupid enough to not copy mail contents to have it stored elsewhere if it's important, like account details. I also don't route anything work-related through Gmail.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
You can backup your gmail account through the use of POP, however this is cumbersome and it does not allow you to reimport them should something happen. Google should really consider offering a zipped archive of all your mail as well as some file with the metadata and allow you to reimport all your emails (they could keep some checksum to make sure it's really gmail messages that used to be there). This would make gmail even better (it's already better than most webmail free services which don't allow POP).
I agree that they probably have better redundancy than the average user, however, if they are taking the responsibility for my data, they should be making backups that can recover in case of data loss. RAID is good, however if a file is corrupt, or deleted, then it is corrupt on multiple disks or deleted from multiple disks.
Are they willing to take on the added cost of backup/storage. If so, how far back to the backups go? How often is the backup run?
If my data is local, then it's my responsibility to make backups.
Flexible bare-metal recovery for Linux/UNIX
My ISP blocks ports 80 and 25 - particularly irritating, if you ask me. My ISPs TOS, if read to the letter, would mean that multiple browser windows or tabbed browsing are inappropriate because it's more than one session over the broadband pipe.
I agree that it would be ideal if I could use every port I want, block the ones I want to firewall - but I'm too cheap to pay for that kind of access.
So I work around it. I use dyndns to create a pointer to my dynamic IP address. My ISP does not block https or ssh ports, so I leverage those to get what I want.
I use cron, fetchmail,
procmail,
spamassassin, and
postfix to bring mail from my ISP to my local system.
I use uw-imapd to share my mail with other computers on my home network
I use ssh and pine, or apache+php+MySQL+https (self-signed cert) with roundcube to get remote access to my IMAP server.
I use WinSCP to get access to my files at home when I'm at work. My data is *MINE* and I easily back it up (nightly and offsite qurterly - snapshot backups coming soon thanks to rsnapshot, perl and rsync)
Every tool that I use is free of charge and as free as the GPL and apache licenses are free (zealots can feel free to argue with someone else about the relative freedom of the GPL, thanks.)
I certainly could pay for more open TOS with an ISP - I could even host my applications at an ISP. I'm cheap, and this solution works well enough for me.
Respectfully,
Anomaly
But Herr Heisenberg, how does the electron know when I'm looking?
No.
Granted online services in general probably have better equipment, better techs and redundancy that I can only dream of but the intangible that the parent poster is talking about when speaking of control is based on value and care. As a customer I am valuable to an online service and they will take a lot of steps to ensure my satisfaction (if they want to stay in business that is) but they will only go so far. I, on the other hand, have no problem spending the better part of my life recovering something if I care about and place a high value on.
Now it would appear from the group posts I read and the TechCrunch article that Google made a good faith attempt to find out what the problem was and at least partially restore some users email but beyond that they pretty much said "Sorry, we'll try not to let it happen again..."
The difference between me and GMail at this point, as someone mentioned above, is that after 12+ years of computing I've never lost an email I cared about; GMail just did.
Creationist Textbook Stickers Declared Unconstitutional by CowboyNeal
You haven't said anything that's incorrect, but everything you said applies to your own PC/Server/whatever at home...
Failures/outages happen at home too, and when they happen (for most people, which don't maintain a backups) it's a lot more catastrophic than gmail (or other web service) being down for a little bit. So you had an unforeseen and untimely outage of your web-based email service, well, it could have just as easily have been an unforeseen and untimely failure of your PC. And I suspect it would have taken you more than a couple of hours that get it back up, and possibly without any data.
Other than outages, generally access is enhanced by these web-based services. Ever been NOT at home and needed to lookup something from your inbox? Well, it's pretty hard if all your email are in outlook/thunderbird on your PC at home... And I do realize that many people on Slashdot probably run their own webmail and imap server on their basement server farm (me included), but again I am talking for most people here.
I simply forward my GMail to my local POP3 account and get a local copy using ThunderBird. Once a week, it takes me about 10 minutes to delete stuff that I don't want permanently archived. When I backup my stuff to DVD-Rs, I also include my ThunderBird inbox.
Google relies on replication of data for backup - statistically OK, but for a free service I don't mind also doing my own backups.
it always made sense to me to have both online and offline storage so if my hard drive goes out or if the web is down, I can still get to my stuff. So I set my gmail to use pop and download it from thunderbird, which is open source and on any platform I happen to bump into.
Firefox Power http://firefoxpower.blogspot.com/
It sounds like the simplest solution to the problem of services not backing up user data is to allow the user to perform periodic backups. If they want a business model, charge for backing up data on the server or allowing more frequent than once a fortnight downloads of the backed up data.
What you are missing is that "control" here is only a shorthand for "independence". No person can really have control over a computer anyway because it is a magic box that operates on the atomic scale, but one can possess that magic box and operate it.
If you have your data on your computer then the only thing you are relying on is power and the continued operation of your computer. You are independent because, with a generator, you have in your possession the only things you need. On the other hand, if google has your data you are also relying on their infrastructure, your internet, the intervening internet, your credit, their continued operation, their goodwill, and so on. In a catastrophe or a terrorism you could easily be without your data for weeks or months if it's stored on the web.
Put it this way, if there is a world-society-ending event I'd much rather have my laptop with a local copy of Wikipedia on disk / hddvd where the only thing I need to find is power rather than have it "on the web" in some datacenter in FL where I need 2+ megawatts just to access it.
imagine if someone ran a test where they deleted things and then were able to fiddle with something in their account and bring them back, we'd be here right now discussing a story about how "Gmail doesn't really delete the things that you ask it to delete" wouldn't we?
This same exact thing happened to me with my hot mail account. All of my prior email and contacts were lost on 2/4/04.
Did this happen to anyone else. Does Google or Microsoft even care? Does this mean that Hotmail and Gmail are unsuitable for business use and are unliable unless paid for their service?
M
The portability of the interface (i.e., the ability for one to access email from anywhere) is great; but the main problem isn't so much the quality of these back-end applications, but making the back-end of the datastore portable as well. For example, if a user favors gmail as an application, yet prefer to use a different POPmail server under the hood. Anyone know of a Web-based email service that is that flexible?
You don't have to give up control of your information just to have access to it from most any computer.
With a USB thumb drive (which has ever increasing capacity) along with some apps from here, I can have the best of both worlds. My data is with me at all times, and it's in my hands, not the hands of some corporation which may use my data in ways I don't like, or lose it, or go under.
True. My logic stemmed from that I could take the backup and throw it on any other machine close at hand and fire up the email or other app and get access to the data. The flaw in my logic is that I have the spare machine to use, and plenty of Knoppix/Ubuntu/etc. disks laying around to use if I didn't, where the "average" user probably only has one machine. Good point.
My willingness to trade this control for release from my responsibilities (for taking care of my stuff) only goes that far.
Well, you can keep your money under your mattress, but banks are generally safer, even though you have a lot less control over when you can make deposits and withdrawals, etc.
For me, I regard on-line mail services and "desktops" as soon becoming like my bank (they aren't there yet). I look forward to using Gmail as my primary email account, and letting Google protect my correspondence from fire, flood, and accidental reformats. And from identity thieves, which are really worrisome since I can't make it my full time job to keep up with their latest shenanigans.
I won't begin to rely on Google until they say they are ready: when the beta is over. And then I will evaluate their security measures and toolset before I commit. But I fully expect Google to be able to do a better job of security than I can reasonably do myself, and I expect them to offer a nice set of tools, including a way to archive old correspondence to a long term storage medium.
In the meantime, I am happily using Gmail for around 20% of my correspondence, and getting used to using multiple labels for organization rather than the mutually exclusive pigeonhole into different sub folders that is the best that Thunderbird currently offers.
Now before everyone goes off, lets really look at this. Just how reliable is your internet connection? How reliable is anyones? I do lots of consulting and have clients that have DSL to connect their various offices. The problem with DSL is that in their never ending effort to gather market share they are fire saleing the service. Get your AT&T/Yahoo ( or whomever is offering it ) DSL for next to nothing! Well the problem with that model is that your support is, next to nothing
As an example of the problems that are being faced today. I started off lots of my customers with UU.Net. Remember them? ROCK solid, support was fantastic you actualy got someone on the other end of the 800 number who actualy knew something, AND had the tools to fix your problem, in other words, you got an engineer. You also paid for the service to the tune of about $175.00 a month for 384kb business grade SDSL with a /29, more if you asked for it. Then UU.Net was purchased by MCI and things were still good, but not quite AS good. Then there was the whole problem of insider trading, etc. and then MCI became WorldCom. The whole thing got swallowed up by Verizon.
Now originaly UU.Net used Covad to provide the local DSL loop and that was good too because Covad in the beginning had over 100 mobile techs in the SF bay area. When UU.Net got swallowed by MCI, MCI also purchased a DSL provider call Rythms since they wanted to be an end to end provider. Now that Verizon is calling the shots, they no longer wnat to be an end to end provider. They disolved Rythms and are moving everyone back over to Covad.
No normaly these migrations work out fine. They bring you a knew router, you keep your same IP block and your down for about 10 minutes. In this particualr case, the script that was sent out to Covad to provision the router, was wrong. it had NAT enabled on the WAN side of the router?!? The Covad tech, which there are now a total of 6 mobile techs for the entire SF Bay Area, didn't catch this, nor is he expected to, since he is way overworked and way underpaid.
So all of the sudden the e-mail & web servers are not visable to the outside world. So since I have the techs number I call him, and he says, hey you could surf the net! So hit Verizons 800 number and try and get support. Now mind you this is aroud 3pm PST. Verizons DSL support hours are 8am to 8pm EST! So I get the support "coordinator" who dutifly takes my info and tells me someone will call me back in with 24 working hours. At this point I start to get a bit testy. I ask to speak with her supervisor and this takes about 20 minutes of hold time. I explain everything to this person and after another 20 minutes of hold time I get a 1st level support person. I explain everything, yet again, and the golden question comes, "Can you surf the net?". At this point I calmly explain to him that yes, we can surf the net and thats not the problem. The problem is they that nothing can be seen from the outside world! His reply is still, "well you can surf so I dont see the problem". At this point my calmness simply vaishes and I demand HIS supervisor. Well his supervisor is busy, would I like to hold? As you dear reader might imagine my teeth are now grinding.
So after a few more rounds with this guy he says he is now on overtime and that he can't stay on the line any longer, but he will leave a note for his supervisor. So I hang up, call my client and tell them the unfortunate news. I get up at 4am PST the next day so I can be ready to catch the call that will be comming from Verizon, only the call never comes. So I hit the 800 number at 5AM PST and at this point I just start demanding everyones supervisor. I finaly get someone in the DNS group ( oh yeah, you can only make DNS changes, M-F, 8am to 8pm EST and ONLY via e-mail ) because he happened to come in early to clean up some paper work. Now as it turns out, he is an old school from the original UU.net cre
Hey KID! Yeah you, get the fuck off my lawn!
So what we need to understand is what steps we can take to back up email from GMail. Obviously if we are doing POP, we are no longer talking about using the GMail interface, so that is not a solution. We can run a POP app in the background without removing mail from the server so that local backup solutions can have a chance at the data, but that's a pretty heavy app to run to ensure this. We need some way of having a backup of that data, but if I have to keep my 2GB GMail acct local or wait for the data to sync before deleting mails.
Yes, this is very much about control. I can back up a local server and keep copies off site. Yes, a major catastrophe has the potential to wipe me out, but those are very, very few and far between. For all those other occasions, a backup copy will be available for recovery. If you are losing mail more often than that or have people frequently requesting restores of mail, you need to revise your support policy. And if the data is important enough, then you can get into cross-site replication for geographically diverse off site storage. And if that giant meteor hits... well email will be the least of our worries.
"Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart, he dreams himself your master."
Well, the same service issues are in Google CheckOut as in this thread. http://groups.google.com/group/google-checkout-bas ics/browse_thread/thread/5493f381440263b6/#
I don't think those tech Genius in google would like to handle customer services ...
They are just too super to be CS.
My feeling is not to trust such a company that says "never" ...
> Will it ever be possible to do away with desktop solutions like Outlook and Thunderbird?
Why bother? I use Google's Application for your Domains for my e-mail, however, I prefer using Thunderbird with Google's Pop & SMTP interface over the web interface. I only use the web interface when I need to search through my e-mail archive.
Where are we going, and why am I in this handbasket?
HaHa! I didn't even loose my precious 676 mails from my spam folder, HaHa!
I am a university student and have had professors tell me that they haven't recieved emails that I send to them. I also have had the same problem recieving emails. I was wondering if anybody else has had this same problem with gmail? Or is it probably my universit's mail server?
It's called a shell account. Everything is right there, easily accessible via ssh. No files to be moved around. A single location to backup!
mutt for email.
apache/firefox for viewing attachments
What more could you want?
Indeed. Kind of ironic if they said "Whoops, your email is all gone, but we have a copy of it all that was sent to the 'User profiling and advertising' department"...
Which, honestly, I wouldn't doubt. Is Google the new MS?
Anyways, now imagine you are a CTO. You can't do everything yourself, so your choice is between the bozos who work for you at your company, or the bozos who work for you at another company because you have a contract. What's the difference? Admittedly there are pros and cons either way, but if you outsource you get specialists.
In fact, a service org probably has RAIDed drives and automated and offsite backup systems superior to what most people are doing on thier own... if they're doing it at all.
I'm having trouble resolving this comment with the topic of the thread, namely "Lost GMail Emails."
When I was a kid, we only had one Darth.
For the obscenely paranoid (or maybe not given this event), one could have a stand-alone box completely removed from any working environment (VM?) and use a pop app to download the messages yet leave them on the server- a tactic that I've employed in the past with other services. This way you have a copy on that server that can't infect those around it (viruses wouldn't be launched and super-high security measures would be dealt upon the inbox). Even going so far as to convert everything to text only and strip attachments... Now this wouldn't be restorable to GMail, but it would be a semi-inefficient way to back things up. Hmm... how about a server with multiple clients and then you charge to back up their webmail for them?!? Sounds like an easy way to do nothing and get paid for it.
You can backup your Google contacts locally via the Google gmail export feature. Click "contact" and look for "export" in the upper-right-hand-corner.
Take control of your data, backup even your service-based data on a regular basis!
Horns are really just a broken halo.
That is, the "score" of who has lost all my e-mails, how many times. The risk of Gmail data loss is scary for the same reason plane crashes are scary. Lots of people are affected all at once. Still, Gmail (or planes) is safer than your own computer (or car).
Nothing to see here. Move along.
There is a difference between control and data security. Just because the data on my local computer is at higher risk of being lost due to hardware failure doesn't mean that I don't have more *control* over it. They are completely different issues.
-matthew
"THERE IS NO JUSTICE, THERE IS ONLY ME." -Death
Number of users for whom I've lost email: 0
:)
Number of users for whom Google has lost email: >0
You forget, those people who run "enterprise" systems - they're just people who go home sometimes, and when they're home, they don't forget how to run a proper system. My mail servers are faster, though, and will remain that way until Google starts offering dedicated machines with gigabit connectivity to my workstation. Maybe you can't manage to figure out how to automate backups, and maybe you think that working for a big company somehow makes people smarter (even though I presently work for a huge company), but the fact remains - the ISP in my basement is more reliable than Google, in terms of reliability that matter to me. I don't have the *capacity*, but that is 100% irrelevant. I also don't have several layers of clueless management and CYA forms to fill out.
Lots of people who read and post to the dot here aren't your average "just know enough to be dangerous" home sysadmins. Some of us actually know what we're doing.
Your "control" is an illusion, and the potential to lose your data is just as real. In fact, a service org probably has RAIDed drives and automated and offsite backup systems superior to what most people are doing on thier own... if they're doing it at all.
This addresses the issue of data loss. There are plenty of other issues. Including who can look at the data and/or alter it. What happens to data which should have been deleted. Even exactly where the data is. Just using such a service can mean you have broken data protection/export laws e.g. if you are in the EU and your data ends up in North America.
In your case you may "think" you're in control, when in fact your last backup copied over the same corrupted data, your archive DVD is now unreadable, and your last full offsite backup is two months old.
On the other hand you know where your data and backups actually are. Thus arn't risking being fined to bankruptcy or even finding out that your data is in the middle of a war zone...
The matter is that I can (and I am forced) to take steps to ensure the security of my data. And I alone am to blame if I fail to do so.
There's quite a lot of data where handing it over to some third party is mutually exclusive with ensuring its security...
My computer doesn't require the internet to function, and I don't need the internet in order to use my computer effectively.
:)
Come to think of it, I use my computer more effectively when the internet isn't available.
Eviscerati.Org: All Hail the Eviscerati
More accurately, when an e-mail or a few thousand e-mails are gone, they aren't going to spend any real effort retrieving that data. It's unlikely that that data is COMPLETELY gone, it just doesn't make business sense to try to dig it up. GMail is not an enterprise solution, it's ad-supported webmail. Seriously folks, get some perspective.
Check out my lame java blog at www.javachopshop.com
Maybe you should read what we were talking about before you hit the reply button. We already established that they wouldn't so we were talking theoreticals, workarounds, and irony.
This comment is right on the money. Plane crashes scare people because they are so public, yet air travel is nearly the safest mode of transportation out there. This data loss is high visibility, but I would guess that there is more risk of loss at home (or at the office) than there is through a centralized service.
I use irony whenever I can, but my shirts are still wrinkled...
A lot of people are bandying about this "illusion of control" argument, and it's a valid one to make. Still, so far the comments are missing a really important nuance.
When I have a catastrophic failure, either at work or at home, I stay up all day and night to get the thing working again. I call in the tapes from offsite, I start a new server build while I'm waiting, and I try to minimize the downtime as much as possible. It's my job/posterior on the line, so minutes are important.
Now, put the shoe on the other foot. I'm a sysadmin at Google taking care of someone's free mailbox. Think I'm going to skip the Christmas party just to get your mailbox back? Yeah sure, I care about the company's PR, but only so much. If it were a Google employee's mailbox, then maybe. The level of effort and sense of urgency is a lot less when it's not your foot in the fire.
just a thought,
jb
complete email archives lost to online services: a couple
complete email archives lost to dead desktops: 10 million? 20?
they probably have some catching up to do
sic transit gloria mundi
What I find absolutely frustrating is that I do not have the ability to back up my Gmail account on my home computer as a 300 MB tarball or the like. In order to have my backup, I've got to download a mail client - like Thunderbird, store it in Thunderbird's proprietary format, and wait patiently as Thunderbird downloads my 30,000 messages... 300 messages at a time. No. Unh-uh. I really think there needs to be some way to tarball the files and just upload them back into Google's server. Comeon, Googie, why can't you add that?
I used to work for NetQoS. I no longer do, but want to keep the excellent karma attached to this account.
enable POP3 access, script a nightly download of all your email.
problem solved.
restoring it is another matter. gmail doesn't have a way to repopulate a mailbox with a set of existing backed up emails that will properly preserve the date stamp (the date it lists is the received on date so just bouncing them to your hosted gmail address shows the date you restored them).
people who store their email locally on their machine using random mail reader often lose it due to software, OS or hard drive crashes. they don't go post whining about it to a public forum blaming someone else when that happens because its their own fault for not backing up, just like existing gmail users who don't backup.
What I envision are n-tier applications with data mirroring/backup nodes. You'd have a local database on your machine for performance, and some form of replication or detached synchronization process pushing changes to a corporate, ISP, or web service. If your node goes belly up, you reimage or reinstall and refresh from the archives.
Add in some of the peer redundancy that BitTorrent or financial systems use, and the corporate/ISP nodes could do a distributed backup as well. For example, sk.ca nodes might be backed up by mb.ca and ab.ca nodes. mb.ca might be backed up by sk.ca and on.ca, and so on. The actual peering would depend on the specifics of the data.
Of course that means the corporate/ISP nodes must implement very strong information privacy, encrypted backup tapes, and secure id systems.
As an added benefit, some business processes could be automated behind the scenes. Sales systems databases could have daily batch runs to submit EOD sales taxes and such. Inventory systems might automate ordering for warehouses, retailers, and manufacturing.
Do you realize that if the trucks stop delivering to a modern auto manufacturing plant, the entire production line stalls within 15-30 minutes? JIT means no parts warehouse, but it trades off the inventory expense for the risk of a supply line disruption.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
It's called Lotus Notes, and they had that nailed over a decade ago. Of course they only had it available via HTTP 7 or 8 years ago.
is it me or does gmail flood email accounts with spam? ive never given out my email address, in fact, ive never even sent mail from it, yet the account and others i have with gmail, but very seldom use get an enormous amount of spam. am i alone?
Why UNIX?
I don't see why you don't set your Gmail to POP all email to your desktop.
That's what I do. If Gmail loses my mail, then so be it, because while I have the convenience of an online email account, I also have the assurance of control and safety of my RAID5 desktop.
As far as security issues... if I care about Google bots reading a particular email, I'll use PGP.
I generally agree with you. I have been using computers long enough now to have been burned on several occasions from making the poor choice of going with options outside of my control. I have all of my email going back to around 1997 easily accessable, EXCEPT for the emails that were on Yahoo! Mail!, which! decided! to! delete! all! of! my! email! because! I! hadn't! logged! in! for! a! while! Google has a similar policy, but my hard drive doesn't. If I want to go three months without checking my email, so be it. In my mind, Google is just Yahoo, but done less wrong. And I see absolutely no reason why I should allow Google or anybody else to data mine my emails in order to "serve" me targeted ads.
Best Slashdot comment ever
It's not totally an illusion. Statistically it may be safer to fly but the driving accidents include every moron, 16-year-old, and grandma driving down the road. When I drive I do have some control over whether or not I have an accident. It's not 100% fullproof because there are impossible odds at times but I have personally come out of many bad situations unscathed based on driving skill and/or having a high performance vehicle.
I love flying but only if I'm the one flying the plane.
I attempted to make the switch from Yahoo mail to Gmail about a year ago. I set up Yahoo to forward all my incoming email to Gmail and started using it. A couple days later I was locked out of Gmail for "unusual usage". I guess simply using Gmail can qualify as unusual usage. I had important emails I was unable to get at for 3 days until my account was unlocked. Since then I have refused to use Gmail. Now hearing about people losing all their email, I'm glad I'm not using it.
So, let me get this straight - the first thing you'll want to have access to after a "world-society-ending" event is a encyclopedia of questionable accuracy, filled with mostly trivial information? I guess that's OK, though, since you'll be easier to defend against by those of us who will hoard food and weapons.
It is a shame slashdot discussions age so quickly. And so badly. Some really insightful comments here. But...
You are bringing an interesting point here. My arguments probably don't hold that well in the case of businesses outsourcing the maintenance of their their e-mail service. Reason being that 'uninterrupted' and 'fault-free' (note quotation symbols) e-mail service is not priceless. It has monetary value that can be estimated. So, this would be a balancing act: what you would spent paying your own employees vs. what you would spent farming it out to somebody else (with placing some monetary value on risks in either case). But, as far as I understand, what google offers is not really a product aimed at businesses. Not yet, anyway.
-m-
I would like to die like my grandfather did - sleeping. And not screaming in terror, like his passengers.
Gmail offers POP downloads for both all incoming AND outgoing e-mail. Install Thunderbird, set up with Gmail, download everything once a week and backup your contacts to Thunderbird's address book. There, problem solved :-)
I personally use Gmail for the interface and delete e-mail after it is 30 days or so old anyways as opposed to storing it (I'm much more worried about accidentally remaining logged in to Gmail on a school machine, exposing years of backups, than I am about Google's handling of my e-mail)
That's what you think! That's the greatest picture I've had all day!
.....If your online service is gone or the internet access is failing, you are completely locked out of your data.......
This is exactly what happens around here when there is a power failure. Even though we have a generator and have power, the Internet doesn't work if the commercial power dies. The phone still works, but the DSL part of it no longer responds. There is a lot of technology between the customer and the web servers and all of it is subject to failure. There is less technology subject to loss of function for the local users. It will be a LONG time, if ever, before the Internet is as reliable as POTS or the average hard drive. Drives are pretty cheap now and keeping a RAID is not all that expensive.
All theory is gray
The trolling around here is really lacking these days.
It's also worth mentioning that in addition to everything that you say (which I believe is correct, as it matches my understanding of Gmail's behavior) when you download a message via POP, Gmail removes it from the "Inbox" of the web interface, and puts it into the "All Mail" folder instead.
This is normally helpful, since it means if you use your POP reader for most of your mail, and then go on vacation or suddenly decide to use the web interface, you won't have thousands of messages in your Inbox. However, if you have your POP reader set up to check mail every 5 minutes, and are away from your computer and try to use the web interface, you will not see anything in your Inbox (if it's been more than 5 mins since the message arrived), because it will be automatically downloaded by the POP reader and shuffled off into All Mail.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
I would not want things to get to the point that you have to remain connected, just to do anything on my computer. Here's a breif list of reasons.
1) Having to trust other people: Maybe I am a bit paranoid sometimes, maybe even to the point of reaching for the tin foil hat, but I don't want anybody to be able to access all of my data.
Employees can and do go bad, and you never know when they may access that data, or sell it (if it has any potential monetary value), change it or whatever.
2) Wall Street: Companies go belly up for many different reasons,
and online/internet services, sites, and such can disappear the next day without any notice. Anything can cause a company to go belly up, including a recession or depression, investors freaking out, scandel within a company *cough*Enron*cough*.
3) Having to constanty shell out money: I don't want to have to pay yet another bill so they won't shut off access to my apps.
Of course, companies salivate over this idea, and hope to push it on computer users.
I used Gmail for your Domain for a few of the domains I have and it's been absolutely terrible. Some accounts just plain won't receive certain emails. Anything I have my php scripts send me, including customer contact forms off of the website just plain disappear. Not in the spam folder, no bounce message, nothing. And I double checked the SPF records, they were perfect. Funniest part is that all of the other accounts DO receive these emails.
_ to_receive_email_stop_using_gmail/
Another account stopped being able to send email. I sent maybe 20 messages total out of this account and then it told me that I had hit my limit and could not send any more emails. Except for when I connected via POP3, then it sent just fine. Except a few weeks after that, It stopped receiving messages, instead sending a bounce message that my in box was full. This was my 2 gig in box with about 150 emails in it.
And I know of someone else who let me log into their account to see if I could fix it. their account took around 4 minutes to log in and a similar amount of time to do anything (open an email, switch to the spam folder, archive a message, *anything*). I longed out and longed into my account and it worked perfectly. Deleted cookies and cache and his lagged again. Tried his account on another computer and it lagged again.
I contacted google's support and WHEN they responded, it took no less than a occasionally a week. Ad then it was just with a generic pre-written message, never anything solid. But they didn't even respond half the time.
All in all I was rather shocked at how terrible gmail for your domain is, given that I very much like my regular gmail account.
And I'm not the only one who's seen this: http://www.456bereastreet.com/archive/200610/want
Nathan Friedly
Many slashdotters have been advocating GMail as an enterprise solution for business email, and Google claims that they use GMail for their internal corp mail. I wouldn't use it for such, myself, mind you.
I recall the story where after AOL bought Time/Warner, they tried to force Time/Warner to switch from their current corp mail solution (I think it was Exchange) to AOL mail. That experiment was a complete fiasco, and Time/Warner switched back to their old mail solution pretty quickly.
-- "I never gave these stories much credence." - HAL 9000
I use GMail and have Thunderbird set to poll the GMail account for messages via pop. It works nicely and I have a copy on my own computer and one in All Mail via GMail. It's a good solution for me as I avail myself of the excellent spam filter technology deployed by GMail. I'm reasonably comfortable with the safety of my mail.
The only thing that really concerned me in the article and the dialogue in Google Groups was the apparent stone walling tactics by Google of an agitated client who had lost all of their data. The guy got a robotic reply, then silence. This is simply not good enough. Google fell all over themselves to reassure the folks at Techcrunch.com that they were working hard to fix the problem. The lesson appears to be that single users don't merit consideration, but techcrunch.com does. At the very least, this is discourteous.
In addition to "Do no evil", maybe they could add, "Mind your manners".
In times of trouble, the smell of frying onions usually gives confidence and comfort.
is to not do anything important or meaningful ever again.
/. posting! Whee!
Leaving more time for
If I have data on my hard drive, it's under my control. It's not an illusion. Yes my hard drive could crash, but at least I get to decide if I want to make backups regularly. Nobody can control unforeseen occurrences, obviously. That doesn't mean I have no control over anything.
Besides, do you really want the likes of google having all of your data on a server somewhere in California? Let's not forget that they are basically an advertising company that just so happens to have cool tools for people to use. What, do you really think they won't use that data to gather intelligence about you? If not now, what about in the future? That's what I mean...if it's on my hard drive, I own it, I see it, I control it, and unless someone gets past my firewall nobody else can make a claim on my data. That's about as much control as one could reasonably want.
blah blah blah
.. it is possible, but not in a public environment like the internet. you don't know what user x will be coming to your site with. In an office, one can control the OS, the software that is on the machine and versions and so on. Thus you could setup an entire office online. On the web it will be more difficult to do something like that, and some people want their data local and not remote. At an office those things can be enforced, and users don't necessarily have a choice in the matter.
Only 'flamers' flame!
Does slashdot hate my posts?
>... Will it ever be possible to do away with desktop solutions like Outlook and Thunderbird? Given the nature of the internet, will it ever be possible to truly move to an 'online desktop'?
Look at banking: Where's most/all of your money, in your home, or in the bank? If we can trust financial institutions with almost all of our money, why can't we trust these service providers with our data? What we need is regulation.
I never understood the need for Outlook, Thunderbird, or Evolution. The only thing I use Evolution for is the calendar (I'd like to just replace it with Sunbird, but Sunbird has issues). It never made sense to me to keep your email on your computer. I'd much rather be able to check my email from multiple places. I can get it at the library, at home, on my laptop, at work, at school, from friends' houses...why tie it to one computer? Then it's as bad as having to check the real, physical mailbox.
look! it's a bird, it's a plane, it's....a girl? yes, a girl browsing Slashdot on Linux
It has the potential to be because Google is worried about advertising revenue and nothing else. If they can get more advertising revenue (such as by censoring an entire country's search results), they'll do it. The only thing that will stop them is if they lose advertising revenue in the longterm, and even that won't necessarily stop them, only give them pause.
Microsoft on the other hand SHOULD be about providing good software to its customers. Unfortunately Microsoft is about keeping its monopoly.
So while I doubt very much Google will ever get a monopoly in advertising revenue, they do have the potential to become 'as evil' as Microsoft.
I have never been able to recover any of the outlook mail that I've lost the dozens of times windows has fucked up on my system.
I know I should probably try thunderbird but I've been using Yahoo Mail perfectly for so many years now that I don't see any reason to switch.
also, e-mail is useless to me if I can't access it from anywhere I find internet access.
I don't have and don't want a laptop.
If all my mail is on my pc at home while I'm on vacation in Canada then it's totally useless to me.
Is someone tracking Google's Karma on /.?
It's off the charts.
Allow me to rephrase the title:
Corporate loses clients' data.
Clients thank the corporate for not losing all of it.
Aren't we entitled to expect more from such services?
"If you don't back up your data, you might lose it"
And the people stood agape...
In that sense, remote desktop could be an improvement for most users that need to format every 3 months or so. (don't get me started on control of your data/privacy/confidentiality etc... this is another issue)
P.
I'm having trouble resolving this comment with the topic of the thread, namely "Lost GMail Emails."
Indeed. Isn't the first issue "how could GMail permit this sequence of events to occur?" After all, any mail service provider has a collection of choices involving protection of content from loss. Google seems particularly well-suited to make highly protective choices. Why weren't they made?
Google's policy is clear: "Unfortunately, we're unable to recover messages or Contact entries that have been deleted from your account." The cited Techcrunch article makes it appear as if Google is attempting recovery in some cases, but what could "attempting recovery" possibly mean in a firm where backups are being done properly? That is, what is preventing restoration?
Are backups being done properly? I know that some technologists mistake RAID/Mirroring type solutions for backup. Surely Google wouldn't make that mistake, but might they actually have a policy of not performing "proper" backups?
A second issue is, as has been discussed, the question of outsourcing vs. insourcing. There are a few different factors involved in this decision (ie. privacy), but let's limit our examination to the protection of our information against loss.
One of the concerns here is flexibility and choice. If some exploit in my IMAP server, for example, permitted a break-in and removal of my email, I've a clear recovery path. Of course, I can restore the missing content from backup. But how to I make use of the content while better protecting it than before? That is, how do I properly recover from this incident so it doesn't reoccur? I could enhance external security (ie. limit IMAP access to VPNs, for example). I could fix the IMAP software. I could switch to different IMAP software.
I have all these options because I own the data. If GMail owns the data, then I've no choice at all. In a sense, even GMail's choices are limited. I could, for example, choose to switch my mail to Yahoo. GMail cannot make that choice for me.
But this isn't completely an issue of outsourcing vs. insourcing. I get exactly the same power of I outsource but I maintain my own backups. This doesn't address privacy or security issues, of course, but it does answer the issue of protecting against information loss.
Why don't more GMail users do this?
I'd suggest that the same people failing to backup their GMail accounts would fail to backup their local servers. But I've no proof of that beyond it being the same failure to consider possibilities in both cases.
Microsoft is just as concerned about a profit as Google. If they can save money by reducing development and testing time, while still charging the same price they will do so. However, like Google, this may cost them in the long term.
The thing of it is that Web apps are already more successful as the "Net machines" of yore.
The reason they didn't take off are wide and varied, but Web apps have overcome many of those weaknesses, the largest of which is that everyone already has the software installed to make reasonable use of a Web app. So, you have a cross-platform application that requires zero installation on most machines, and not even new hardware. Thin client-friendly, too, although in reference to above, I would say that the market probably will not demand that.
And yet you seem very against the idea on a personal level.
To quote a previous comment from you:
You seem to be arguing two things: 1) Even though Google can host your email safer than you, you still prefer to maintain that control since you can justify blaming yourself if something goes wrong, and 2) You hope, for some reason, that Web apps fail miserably.
I may be misunderstanding you.
From my perspective, there is room for both. People who want to can run their own servers, and those that prefer to have the work handled by others can do so as well. Those that host their own can blame themselves when they lose their own data, and those that farm out the hosting can blame their provider.
"Given the nature of the internet, will it ever be possible to truly move to an 'online desktop'?"
No, and I wish people would stop trying. It just isn't a very clever idea at all. I mean, if you want to be able to access some of your files from anywhere, then by all means, store a copy of them online.
Aside from globally accessible data, what other reasons could anyone possibly have for wanting to run all of their applications in a web browser? It just seems... so stupid! Browsers aren't designed for typical desktop applications, and seeing as we already have a perfectly suitable desktop environment already, why waste resources building more complicated (and slower) browsers that can open spreadsheets, write documents and so on?
People who want to work away from their home or office have laptops. It's that simple. Why the heck would anyone want to sacrifice the speed and security of an offline desktop for something much less useful and more prone to hazards? I don't *want* to edit the same document at the same time as other people. Nobody in the world is ever going to do that. It might be a cool novelty, but it's just not that useful, and certainly not enough to convince me that Google's new office suit is any kind of alternative to MS Office or OpenOffice in a business environment.
Besides, the internet isn't as "omnipresent" as a lot of people (particularly in the US) seem to think. It's often down for people. Even when you have a nice, fast, stable connection, it's not always going to be there. Yesterday my home connection experienced a number of seemingly random problems, resulting in speeds of about 2kb/s on average, and continuous drop-outs. If my entire desktop experience was relying on this connection, then I essentially would not have been able to use my computer yesterday at all.
It's slow, and it's unnecessary. Storing files online or running your own web server for accessing your files anywhere is simple and common. Why not just continue doing it that way? I, for one, do NOT want a thin-client, web-based desktop. And I never will.
Yeah pretty funny, but wikipedia has lots of useful articles such as how to make ropes, types of knots, edible nuts and berries (with pictures). I assume at some point one would like to either not be incredibly bored or maybe try to pass down the important trivial everybody takes for granted, like say the periodic table, math, science, etc.