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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'?"
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?
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!"
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.
I don't think Yahoo Mail existed a decade ago, or that was very close to its launch date. Email clients were (still are???) common in academic environments too. A decade ago I was still using Pine (via IMAP), whereas a lot of people had switched to Netscape Communicator. I don't remember many people back then using web mail - it just wasn't very common or popular yet. Apologies for doubting you, but your claim of not using an MUA even though you've used email for over a decade seems rather far fetched - what've you been doing in that time if it wasn't academia or corporate? Most people not in those environments didn't get on the email bandwagon until sometime after 1996.
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.
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)