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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.)
Yup, I just use Hotmail for registrations and such which I'm sure may result in spam and other unwanted messages. It's a serious pain to know whether you have got new messages (I don't use MSN), so I hardly use it. GMail's IMAP function on the other hand is perfect. It really elevates this email service from Yet Another Web-Based Email to something that is actually usable and integrates well with my normal work flow.
Great job, Google.
Site & blog: http://www.mayaposch.com
No, he's not oversimplifying things. If your business relies on email uptime, then rely on a system that will provide/guarantee that.
I'm sure I'm not the only person here who has worked on systems where an hour of downtime meant many thousands of dollars of lost sales. If being down for 4 hours a month costs you $40,000 in lost sales and $12,000 in lost profits, then be willing to spend $12,000 per month more to get the extra 4 hours per month of uptime. If people rely on a free service without a sufficient SLA for this type of business, then they are being foolish.
Personally I host my domains' emails through Google. You know what? I didn't even know it was down. And even if I did, I wouldn't have really cared that much. I would have done one of the many many many other things on my to-do list that don't require email access, and would have expected that if a client was trying to reach me that badly during that period, they'd have just picked up the phone and called.
www.clarke.ca
You don't even need to use Hotmail for spam anymore. Instead, you can use GMail's (+) feature. So...when signing up on a site, type something like...
your.email+spam@gmail.com
Put whatever you want after the + sign. It will still route directly to your inbox. Then, just setup a filter to put anything with "+spam" to the spam folder or the trash or wherever.
It's a beautiful thing.