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Outage Knocks Gmail Offline For Many Users
Many readers noted an outage affecting Google's gmail service last night. Firmafest points to a statement from Google, according to which only a small subset of users were affected. According to reader CaptHarlock, mail itself remained accessible through IMAP clients, and the chat feature via external applications. jw3 asks "Of course, gmail is just one of the many providers of web-based e-mails. When I look around, almost everyone seems to be using them nowadays. So — what do you do? Do you trust that the site of your web-based e-mail provider will never go down? Do you make backups of all your e-mails?" (Some readers still seem to be unable to reach the site, too.)
I never worried about backups. Then I watched this video and now I back up everything. For all I know this "Google" company is a couple seventeen year olds with an old 386sx in their mom's basement. I like their stuff but I can't depend on them to know how to protect my data.
It's hard to believe that's how Micronians are made. Why don't we see it right now by having you both kiss one another?
Use Thunderbird with GMail and configure it so that every time there's a new message it is synced to your local hard drive but also left on the server (IMAP probably though I think the same can be done with POP).
... I'm aware of ways around this but there's a simpler solution: don't use Hotmail. This and the fact that (last I checked) it didn't support forwarding are two very good reasons to move on to a free mail service more dedicated to you. The choice is yours.
My linux box at home has been doing this for years, I just leave Thunderbird open and set my monitor to sleep after 15 minutes of inactivity. I don't care if my GMail and college mail accounts temporarily go down, it's all mirrored on that machine.
Anti-Microsoft zealot bonus rant: I stopped using Hotmail when I realized I could not access it outside of Outlook Express
My work here is dung.
Or do you just not place all of your trust in GMail and do it all yourself? It's more customisable, more unique and more individual, amongst other things.
100% uptime is possible, sure, but you're going to have to pay for it. It'll be horrifically expensive (thousands of dollars a month) because you'll need multiple levels of redunancy across your MTA server(s), web server(s), and connectivity, in two or three locations.
So, because that's a ridiculous expense for practically everyone, you should just chill out. A morning without your email isn't going to kill you. In fact, it might even be good for you. Take some time out. Go for a walk. Spend a few hours with your wife/kids/friends/dog.
People are talking about this outage like it was the end of the world. It made the BBC news! I swear the entire world has lost all sense of perspective (except me, natch).
(I was tempted to make a joke about email services being like girlfriends and how you don't need one that never goes down, but I thought that might be tacky. :) )
http://twitter.com/onion2k
I know all of you won't hesitate to state the obvious, but I've become sort of reliant on Google Docs.
I conduct personal business using it. I have PDFs up there that I only back up to DVD.
Gmail is fine, but if Google Docs had an extended loss of service, I would have to drive 100 miles and go fish out DVDs to restore the docs - and some docs I only have there, and maybe my HD.
The fact that Google Docs won't let me put my files up there in AXCrypt format bothers me. If there was another online storage company I trusted more, and supported all file types - I would switch.
I do trust Google, but every time they go down I realize I really should backup all my info to some computer.
This is of course only rational, but still.
And, yes, I was affected, it was quite annoying.
Why does BBC report this before /.?
I take backups (email, files, etc) more often than Adrian Monk uses wipes. That way, whether its Gmail or Yahoo Mail, I never lose my important emails.
nobody remains virgin, life fscks everyone...
I turned on the "Offline Gmail" feature in the lab...
Did it for the extra speed increase of having all my mail/attachments pre-downloaded, but this also means that I still had access to everything in my account prior to the outage.
So instead of loosing my email, I just had a delay in getting *new* emails.
I steal signatures. This one used to be yours.
I had trouble getting to the inbox this morning (CET), while logging in worked.
Now everything seems ok. It's funny i didn't try POP or IMAP because i wrongly assumed that the web interface was ok and the mail subsystem was down.
It must have been quite widespread, it was reported on radio24 news here in italy.
I always had access to my emails, just:
Enable IMAP:
http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=77695
and configure your email client:
http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=75726
No Gmail fail for me...
apparently half of europe is a small subset of their users, way to go!
Basically, Google Gears plugin uses SQLlite database to store your mail and syncs it automatically. So you can safely use your favourite web interface again.
Whether your email is stored locally or remotely, there's always the chance for data loss, but for most people, I suspect that having your email saved on a remote server is way more reliable than having it stored on your local machine will ever be. If you want the best of both worlds, that's really not that hard to do. One trivial way to do this is to set up your primary email account to automatically forward a copy to a secondary email account, preferably with a different service provider. If your primary becomes unavailable, you can log into your secondary. Problem solved. This ain't rocket surgery.
I see a lot of people here complaining about a non-issue. Google offers offline access for Gmail, Google Docs and several other services. Simple go to settings>labs>offline access in Gmail and enable. It's simple and free.
Well, With Gmail there is no excuse to not back up your emails.
You can use IMAP/POP and Google Gears to backup mail and store emails on your computer.
More fool them, then. I certainly don't. Hell I don't even rely on IMAP: I download all my mail via. POP3 to a local mailbox. I don't need to rely on my providers mail server being up in order to read my email.
... no actual users were harmed during this incident.
Following the cracking of GMail's Captchas and the amount of spam I've seen with a GMail address, I'm guessing that the only things that were knocked off like were bots.
Have gnu, will travel.
But first an observation - for me IMAP did not work (using my Nokia E61)...
Now, since my home business can not afford all the fancy and expensive BCM strategies that corporates implement, what alternative is there to GMail that would (a) give me fairly large mailboxes; (b) have a little more redundancy built in?
PS: In all fairness to Google, even though I currently use them for e-mail for my business I accept I can not expect too much from a free service.
Need an ISP in South Africa?
Did anyone else think this story was about a KDE application? (Knocks) Yeah, I called in sick today, and am on Gnyquil.
Yeah, I'll try and lay off the Gnyquil.
The gmail labs offline option is great, but it doesn't back up all of your mail; only several thousand messages. 95% of the time, that will leave you with what you need offline.
Of course, it's that remaining 5% of the time...
-- Is "Sig" copyrighted by www.sig.com?
I find the windows live mail desktop application does a good job of holding a local copy of my hot mail account. So does my WinMo cell phone (for the last 50 messages).
My main computer still uses POP to download everything. In the others I use IMAP.
Math is beautiful... e^(pi*i)+1=0
For about an hour last night I couldn't access anybody except Google and a handful of sites, apparently at random. I could ping the DNS servers but could not reach most sites. I restarted the DSL modem, my Netgear router, and my machines - no effect. Came back as suddenly as it disappeared.
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
Come on guys? what do you expect, it's still in beta testing.
"Do you trust that the site of your web-based e-mail provider will never go down?"
No, you trust that it'll never go down *for long*, and that when it comes back, your data will still be there.
Over the years, GMail has had way better uptime than anything I could have constructed myself, and the cost to me has been negligible.
Considering the usually exceptional service they offer, and for free, you can't hardly complain. Everybody has downtime sooner or later. That's why they include that %0.01 chance of it happening.
Just consider it a two hour break from the computer.
Since I came in at work this morning, I haven't been able to use google chat. As of now, 10:30 EST, it still appears to be unavailable.
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.
...don't go down.
It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.
I am a business customer of Google's. We use their apps and e-mail package.
"99.9% Gmail, Google Calendar and Google Talk uptime SLA"
The service was down for over 45 minutes, how do you think google will react to a refund request? I'm probably not going to make one, but do you think many people are? Has anybody here? How did it go?
You feel sleepy. Close your eyes. The opinions stated above are yours. You cannot imagine why you ever felt otherwise.
Check out dropbox. It syncs files, built in encryption, platform independent.
http://www.dropbox.com/
Check out dropbox. It syncs files, built in encryption, platform independent.
http://www.dropbox.com/
http://www.getdropbox.com/
I've been locked out of my gMail account for two weeks, and nothing I do will get it back. Google thinks the account belongs to someone else and that I've hacked into it. You'd think that the fact that I haven't written of opened any emails in it since I started trying to get access back might clue them in.
Come to think of it, I'd better change my slashdot default email.
Free Martian Whores!
I gave the Imap access a shot with Kmail and although it worked pretty decently, I'm actually happier with the Pop3 access for the simple reason that I've got a local copy of the message on my system. As to whether I want Gmail to delete anything, hell no it's very nice to know that I have copies of all my gmails and can download everything again should I have a system failure on my end.
Mod me up/Mod me down: I wont frown as I've no crown
All servers should be running Linux. Unlike NT based systems which throw a Blue Screen when you try to multi-task (proven by the good folks at comp.os.linux.advocacy), Linux will never fail. The server could be on fire with mice inside chewing the wires and it will keep serving data for the next 2 years without any updates.
Of course they can go offline, and you are wrong to be upset about it. Gmail is:
1. Free
2. In Beta
Even if it were not free and were not in beta, unless you are paying for 100% guaranteed uptime, they are still allowed to go offline. Sure, no one wants to be without email for a few hours, but we'll survive. If it's that important to you, get a paid 100% uptime service with a solid backup plan.
I'm amazed how people get worked up about short outages like this. Stuff happens.
I don't know whether it's related or not, but I cannot publish comments on Blogger posts today...
They still do it, but it's foolish to use it, IMO. I webmaster for a newsletter that is read by over 1.000 people. We get several changes of email address notes from people moving from DSL to cable, or whatever. Why would you want to go through the hassle of notifying everyone that your email address has changed because you went with a different ISP? Then there are the people that you forgot to notify and the people who forget you've changed... Bah! Get a separate email address like gmail or on your own domain and avoid the hassle.
Yes, in answer to the question about backing up my gmail, I do. Like some of the other comments, I use Thunderbird. In my case it's Thunderbird Portable running on a 16 Gig Flash drive that I carry with me so I have it at home or at the office. It's further backed up at Midnight each night to a backup server at home and to Carbonite.com. My wife also uses a similar setup, but her Thunderbird runs on the backup server and she only accesses her gmail via the web.
"Do the Right Thing. It will gratify some people and astound the rest." - Mark Twain
I've used a lot of email hosts over the past 15 years - including my own, my employer's exchange servers, small mail providers, ISPs, webmail providers - it goes on and on.
None of these other providers has been nearly as reliable as Gmail. In fact, I've yet to experience any failure of any kind (despite last night's reported event).
In summary, I find Gmail to excel in these areas beyond other email providers (webmail or otherwise):
So although some may choose to forgo Google due to this event, I'll stick it out until the competition proves itself better.
Works fine with other POP/IMAP clients, too ;-)
Now I am forced to use an external mail service.
jw3 asks "Of course, gmail is just one of the many providers of web-based e-mails. When I look around, almost everyone seems to be using them nowadays. So â" what do you do? Do you trust that the site of your web-based e-mail provider will never go down? Do you make backups of all your e-mails?"
I followed it and it was fun! Thanks!
System Availability: Is defined by the amount of unplanned downtime a system experiences. System maintenance doesn't count.
The calculations are fairly simple. There are about 30 days in every month (30.4 if you want to be more accurate). 30 x 24 x 60 = 43200 minutes.
43200 min in a month
95.00% 2160 Min/month 36 Hrs/month
98.00% 864 Min/month 14.4 Hrs/month
99.00% 432 Min/month 7.2 Hrs/month
99.90% 43.2 Min/month 0.72 Hrs/month
99.99% 4.3 Min/month 0.07 Hrs/month
Gotta get people using it somehow :)
"Do you trust that the site of your web-based e-mail provider will never go down?"
Obviously In the case of GMail, I do trust it. Although Google still calls it Beta allowing them to pull it down at any time and then say "Well.. it's a beta.. it wasn't really for public use..", the mass amount of users using it would cause such bad publicity. It would knock a pretty sizeable portion of the "email network" down..
Every post here is hailing IMAP as the solution, yet I have not received one email on my imap account all morning. I checked gmail.com and all my messages are still waiting for me. The real solution is to lock your email server in a closet and disconnect it from any network. It's the only way to ensure your email is there.
I think the real question here is whether or not you should put an 's' at the end of email. Do you put an 's' at the end of mail? Probably not. So what makes email different?
Be careful with this, though, because a lot of places you wouldn't expect don't support the + sign. For example, when I had to renew my SSL cert after the debian ssl debacle, I had a problem: the email I used was me+thawte@gmail.com. Thawte has no problem sending junk email to this address, and they accepted it just fine when I initially accepted the cert, but when I went to renew the it, their system was silently dropping the plus and throwing an error when I tried to confirm the reissue.
Their technical support was no help either. After talking with some douche called "Jeremy E", he simply informed me that the best he could do was change the address to me.thawte@gmail.com, which of course is equivalent to methawte@gmail.com and not my address. He then did this without waiting for my approval and sent the reissue information to some total stranger (I tried to register it, it was taken). I never did get them to change the address, nor to reissue the cert.
You would think that a business like SSL certs that charges extortionate (hundreds of dollars) prices for something that an automated system does would have a working email system, but no. I ended up having to buy a new cert from another company.
By the way, THAWTE AND VERISIGN SUCK
weirdest thing I ever saw: scientology advertising on slashdot.
Email sucks. I fucking hate it. It is, in my opinion, one of the worst technologies out there. If possible, it really needs to be replaced; I don't know how you'd go about doing that, because it'd have to be an all-or nothing change over (and likely gov't mandated), but I see this as one of the most crucial things for the whole of IT infrastructure.
The service provider doesn't matter; whether you're doing it yourself on a home server, paying $gazooks per year for a hosted service, or with a free service, they all have major and unpreventable downsides. It's always one (or more of) paying a lot, having to deal with spam and the appropriate filtering, lost mail, and downtime. This is unlike, say, web hosting, which while still facing problems, has significantly fewer and less severe issues.
Also unlike web services/hosting, email has become essential. It's the primary way that many people communicate professionally, and your email address is largely equivalent to many peoples' identity.
Is there a solution? Maybe. But I can't see it being workable without global oversight - "Internet 2" type governmental agency oversight, where anonymity is lost.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
Googles out again........EEEP
Read this while reading gmail help. It was listed on the side of help text as a warning to gmail users... 2/24/2009 Please be very careful when asked to enter your Google username or password after clicking on links sent to you from Instant Messages. We've seen a number of reports from users who've received links appearing to be from friends that ask them to enter their Google Talk or Gmail username and password into a website called ViddyHo.com. If you have entered your username and password in this way, we are asking you to change your Google Account password and update your security question for account security. To learn how, see our help center article on changing your password. Perhaps these users account have been hijacked?
Was Gmail Slashdotted?
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