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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.
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 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 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!
You could always pay for hosting, and store your encrypted files on an FTP site, right?
This. $10 a month and I can have an off site backup. $20 a month and I can have TWO off site backups for my personal data, all encrypted using GnuPG/Trucrypt/whatever both on separate continents. Stop using the "GOOGLE IS MY ONLY OPTION" excuse, there's plenty of other ways to back up your data.
Personally, I use SSHFS and all my files are stored on my home server. Nightly they're archived, encrypted. and shot off to a datacenter in Chicago. It costs me $20 a month for the bandwidth and storage, and it's all encrypted.
Posts not to be taken literally. Almost everything is sarcasm.
... 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.
Because the BBC (and many others) have thousands of employees, and millions of dollars, and can potentially publish hundreds of stories/articles a second.
Slashdot, has like 35 employees, and fuck all for money in comparison, and the stories are published in sequence/intervals, rather than as they happen, or even as soon as possible.
It's been said before, but this is by no means the latest, freshest, most up to date news on the web, frankly I'm surprised it got here as quick as it did (although a few people mentioned it in off-topic comments hours ago)
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.
Because BBC is a news service and slashdot is a news aggregator. Slashdot doesn't "report" anything, they merely provide links to stories and a place to discuss said stories. Until someone else reports on a story, it won't appear on slashdot.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
Expensive?
No. Grab a small box like a linksys nslu2 or a nano-itx board, ADSL with a static IP (I pay an extra £1 permonth for the IP) and a domain name.
Difficult?
No, easy! You just need to install linux (pref. debian) set up an MTA like Postfix or exim, make sure to hook it up to a DNSBL or two, maybe spam-assassin for filtering, rDNS and SPF checks, header validation etc, open port 25 incoming on your router, add in dovecot for IMAP, make sure to set up your own trusted root certificates so you can connect in securely, consider a FOSS webmail solution (squirrelmail?), expose port 80 for that, make sure your passwords are good and strong, continually check for and apply security updates...
I do it. My mailserver runs off an NSLU with a 4GB USB flash stick. I don't think it's for everyone though. Whatever happened to ISPs providing email?
...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.
You could always pay for hosting, and store your encrypted files on an FTP site, right?
This. $10 a month and I can have an off site backup. $20 a month and I can have TWO off site backups for my personal data, all encrypted using GnuPG/Trucrypt/whatever both on separate continents. Stop using the "GOOGLE IS MY ONLY OPTION" excuse, there's plenty of other ways to back up your data.
Personally, I use SSHFS and all my files are stored on my home server. Nightly they're archived, encrypted. and shot off to a datacenter in Chicago. It costs me $20 a month for the bandwidth and storage, and it's all encrypted.
I do that with Amazon S3. The data is backed up in two locations (US and Europe). It costs me 0.83 USD last month.
It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.
I followed it and it was fun! Thanks!
Gotta get people using it somehow :)
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.