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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 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...
... 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.
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?