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Outage Knocks Gmail Offline For Many Users

Posted by timothy on from the blissfully-sleeping-through-it dept.

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.)

7 of 209 comments (clear)

  1. Thunderbird Public Service Announcement by eldavojohn · · Score: 5, Informative

    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).

    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 ... 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 work here is dung.
    1. Re:Thunderbird Public Service Announcement by morgan_greywolf · · Score: 3, Informative

      I do this myself. One thing I like though is to pull in other e-mail accounts and have everything just appear in my inbox without having to have Thunderbird open all the time to automatically check. So in addition, my setup uses fetchmail.

      --
      My blog
    2. Re:Thunderbird Public Service Announcement by Admodieus · · Score: 4, Informative

      Hotmail now has free POP3 to any client and supports forwarding to any address. It does still lack IMAP though.

      --
      "It's a reverse vampire...they....they crave the sun!"
  2. Good thing Google offers IMAP by trmanco · · Score: 5, Informative

    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...

  3. Re:Never go down? by mmkkbb · · Score: 4, Informative

    Google Apps for Domains HAS an uptime guarantee. This may not have been affected by the outage.

    99.9% uptime reliability guarantee

    We guarantee that Google Apps will be available at least 99.9% of the time, so your employees are more productive and so you can worry less about system downtime.*

    --
    -mkb
  4. Re:Google Apps for Business. by slim · · Score: 3, Informative

    Here's the SLA.

    0.1% of 1 month is ~44 mins. 1% of 1 month is ~7.3 hours.

    So it looks like you're entitled to 3 days of free service. W00T!

  5. Re:Never go down? by jimicus · · Score: 3, Informative

    Yeah, but look at the remediation if they fail to meet the uptime - you get some free days of service. That's it. Rather crap of a guarantee.

    I know of no hosted service which will indemnify you for $1,000,000 if they go down for an hour and, by sheer bad luck, that downtime causes you to demonstrably lose a US$1,000,000 order.