GMail Experiences Serious Outage

JacobSteelsmith was one of many readers to note an ongoing problem with Gmail: "As I type this, GMail is experiencing a major outage. The application status page says there is a problem with GMail affecting a majority of its users. It states a resolution is expected within the next 1.2 hours (no, not a typo on my part). However, email can still be accessed via POP or IMAP, but not, it appears, through an Android device such as the G1." It's also affecting corporate users: Reader David Lechnyr writes "We run a hosted Google Apps system and have been receiving 502 Server Error responses for the past hour. The unusual thing about this is that our Google phone support rep (which paid accounts get) indicated that this outage is also affecting Google employees as well, making it difficult to coordinate."

Comments

Anti-Slashdot Effect

[ink]

Seems to be fine at the moment. Is this the first anti-slashdot-effect?

Re:Anti-Slashdot Effect

[maharg]

Heh. Post First. Working fine here too (uk).

Re:Anti-Slashdot Effect

[schon]

Same for me.. was just using it, came here and saw the story, so went back to check, and all is good.

Re:Anti-Slashdot Effect

[Anonymous Coward]

Wonder if it will work for www.amd.com. I've come to expect it's unexpected error.

Re:Anti-Slashdot Effect

[jazzmans]

Yep, it was out for me for about an hour. dunno why. FWIW, I could still see my inbox on my igoogle page, just couldn't access it.

jaz

Re:Anti-Slashdot Effect

[Anonymous Coward]

It stopped working for me, a Texan, for a few hours.

It is interesting to note that www.dell.com was also down for the same time period, and both sites started working again at the same time.

Re:Anti-Slashdot Effect

[vigmeister]

Was out for about an hour here in Seoul. All rosy now. I'm not sure how local this outage was.

Re:Anti-Slashdot Effect

[sopssa]

Before more users jump on the useless non-interesting "working for me"/"not working for me" posts, dont do it. No one really cares.

Re:Anti-Slashdot Effect

[JumpDrive]

I care

Re:Anti-Slashdot Effect

[negRo_slim]

Before more users jump on the useless non-interesting "working for me"/"not working for me" posts, dont do it. No one really cares.

Well I guess you don't care. However I find it worth noting that over the past week or so I've had intermittent problems logging on to Gmail. Usually lasting no more than 5-10 mins at a time hardly worth noting, until this article. And today, for instance, I was alerted to another situation by the angry cursing of my girlfriend as she attempted to log into her account. Whether it's related or not I do not know. Just figured I would share my experience of the matter.

Re:Anti-Slashdot Effect

[Red Flayer]

Is this the first anti-slashdot-effect?

Didn't you get the memo?

f_slashdot(frontpagelink) => serverfire

has been replaced by

f_slashdot(frontpagelink) => OMG PONIES!!!

I think the memo was distributed in early-to-mid 2006.

Re:Anti-Slashdot Effect

[sopssa]

What I mean is that "it works me at place x" is pretty useless. How is it interesting reading 300 posts like that? Theres more intelligent things to discuss about it than if it happens to work for you at this very minute at your random location. It's already established that things are broken.

Re:Anti-Slashdot Effect

[macraig]

It just might be: the news warns people to stay away from and not bother with GMail for a while, so maybe that's exactly what people are doing? Well... except for you, because you peeked!

Re:Anti-Slashdot Effect

[sortius_nod]

Theres more intelligent things to discuss

Maybe take some of your own advice there. Trolling on Slashdot isn't exactly intelligent is it?

Re:Anti-Slashdot Effect

[Akzo]

iGoogle wasn't affected.

Re:Anti-Slashdot Effect

[negRo_slim]

WHO CARES!

Perhaps people eager to ascertain whether it's a coordinated attack or merely a system failure? Or various other thoughts along those lines.

Re:Anti-Slashdot Effect

[Lysdestic]

This is slashdot... did you expect prompt technology news?

Re:Anti-Slashdot Effect

[sortius_nod]

Because your company and personal sandbox are valid representation of a mail system that serves millions of people. When either of your servers do that you can post bullshit like this.

Hell, even the company I work for has outages for both proactive and reactive maintenance, and that's only for 5000 people.

To say that because you've never had an outage you never will have an outage is absurd.

On top of this, saying that google should "have a backup" is silly. Do you even understand how redundancy works? Do you even understand how web based mail systems work? I really don't think so from this comment. If the error has nothing to do with servers falling over and is an issue with routing then you can have all the redundancy you want, but it won't make a difference.

At this stage it's any comments are merely conjecture, until google make a press release advising of what happened comments like "have a backup" are just troll posts.

Re:Anti-Slashdot Effect

[Anonymous Coward]

Nor was Facebook App MafiaWars effected, that is all that matters.

Re:Anti-Slashdot Effect

[drachenstern]

Wait, what? You not only have a girlfriend, but she uses gmail on a regular basis? .drachenstern { color: jealous;} **

Are the intermittent problems at seemingly regular intervals or seemingly regular times? Also, do you ever pay attention to which google cluster seems to be resolving for you at the time? (I wouldn't) Lastly, do you use HTTP or HTTPS?

** Being married and all, I'm just playing to the meme... No, I don't know why I felt compelled to share this, but I figure I'm in a peer group, so ya'll'll get it...

Re:Anti-Slashdot Effect

[drachenstern]

You should look into using https:/// for those transactions, unless you don't use your gmail account for much more than forum-signups...

Re:Anti-Slashdot Effect

[Mike Buddha]

Yeah, that's funny. You know what's also funny? The treadmill I bought 3 years ago and never used is in mint condtion. I've never had a problem with it sitting there under the pile of clothes in the corner. I read that 24 Hour Fitness has TONS of problems with their treadmills going down, but mine just keeps going without a single issue. I guess they just bought the wrong brand. Stupid idiots.

Re:Anti-Slashdot Effect

[Anonymous Coward]

just get chewed out by your google boss?

Re:Anti-Slashdot Effect

[Anonymous Coward]

Right around when this story came out I noticed that the GMail IMAP interface had gotten *really* slow. So IMAP is not "unaffected" so much as "less affected".

Re:Anti-Slashdot Effect

[jason.sweet]

ya'll'll

I'm from from Texas and that even makes my head hurt.
There's some poor schmuck in Bosnia right now googling how to pronounce it.

Re:Anti-Slashdot Effect

[drachenstern]

TL;DR - Southern boy using colloquialism, move along

Hahahaha, I'm from Houston, but grew up even further in the south (think mid Georgia/mid Alabama). Yeah, it's a little tricky, but it'll build character, no?

For the rest of the world, who don't quite grok our quaint pronunciation here in the good ole South, the word ya'll is pronounced like [yawl] similar to [yawn]. It should also be interesting to note that I have used one of the two forms of the conjunction, and I'm often told I use it wrong, but it's a little closer to how we pronounce it. The other spelling is y'all, but that would be pronounced like [ya-awl] and that's just a little to hick-ish even for me.

So if you can get to [yawl] then just tack an extra [ull] on the end and you'll have ya'll'll. You might notice that I tend to conjoin a lot of words, but that's just the spoken style where I've grown up, and as literary style derives from spoken style, well, yeah.

So, ya'll'll have to get a kick out of reading this, and just shake yer heads and mumble something about "that poor southern boy" and if you'd be so kind, drop a dollar in me alms cup as you pass by.

Ok, I've tried now to enlighten the world to some Southern-isms, and I tried to do at least part of it in properly written English, so we'll see. Also, I know it's WAY OT, so hit me with the mod, let's get this over with.

PS, it just means "you all will"

TL;DR - Southern boy using colloquialism, move along

Re:Anti-Slashdot Effect

[Fyzzler]

If you are going to talk about japanese upskirt porn, then at least provide a link. You insensitive clod.

Re:Anti-Slashdot Effect

[elashish14]

Maybe they should have thought twice about taking the beta label off!

Re:Anti-Slashdot Effect

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually someone emailed me an awesome link this morning; lemme go check my gmail.... oh dammit.

Re:Anti-Slashdot Effect

[turbidostato]

"For the rest of the world, who don't quite grok our quaint pronunciation here in the good ole South, the word ya'll is pronounced like [yawl] similar to [yawn]."

For the rest of the world, even the English speaking world, "ya'll" isn't even a word.

Re:Anti-Slashdot Effect

[djdavetrouble]

You and my wife bought the same kind !

Re:Anti-Slashdot Effect

[Mozk]

WHO CARES!

I doubt they do. Wait, was that a question?

Re:Anti-Slashdot Effect

[cujo_1111]

My Gmail works. Send it to me :)

Re:Anti-Slashdot Effect

[Anonymous Coward]

are you really so naive to think we won't know what this means or how to pronounce it? most of the world population grew up on american movies, i'm pretty sure nobody needs such a patronising explanation

Re:Anti-Slashdot Effect

[Mozk]

It's a word in the sense that people use it, and it's useful in replacing the ambiguous second-person plural pronoun:

I...........we
you.........you
it/he/she...they

That being said, I don't use it because it sounds stupid, however useful it is.

Re:Anti-Slashdot Effect

[jason.sweet]

Dude. It was a joke!

Re:Anti-Slashdot Effect

[Anonymous Coward]

Because your company and personal sandbox are valid representation of a mail system that serves millions of people. When either of your servers do that you can post bullshit like this.

Hell, even the company I work for has outages for both proactive and reactive maintenance, and that's only for 5000 people.

To say that because you've never had an outage you never will have an outage is absurd.

On top of this, saying that google should "have a backup" is silly. Do you even understand how redundancy works? Do you even understand how web based mail systems work? I really don't think so from this comment. If the error has nothing to do with servers falling over and is an issue with routing then you can have all the redundancy you want, but it won't make a difference.

At this stage it's any comments are merely conjecture, until google make a press release advising of what happened comments like "have a backup" are just troll posts.

I have had a gmail account since 2002, however if you rely on gmail as a business email you seriously need your "head testing". The same goes for any other free service. You do realise that google is full of spyware now in the advent of anti-terrorism laws and M$ is far worst, I just do not think you know how paranoid gov agencies are and how all our rights are being eroded. Try and use an open source web search engine in future http://www.us.apachecon.com/c/acus2009/sessions/427 and never use a free service... Remember you never get nothing for nothing.

Re:Anti-Slashdot Effect

[Dahan]

No, it's not useful for that purpose. "Ya'll" is a colloquial contraction of "you will" (i.e., a colloquial form of "you'll"), and isn't particularly Southern as far as I know.

The second-person plural pronoun often used in Southern speech is "y'all"--a contraction of "you all."

Re:Anti-Slashdot Effect

[drachenstern]

As you so quoted me, but seem to have trouble with reading comprehension:
"For the rest of the world ... other than here in the South ..."

I don't expect the rest of the world to use the word, hence the wall-o-text explanation. HTH. YMMV. GTFO.

Re:Anti-Slashdot Effect

[shanen]

Off topic? Typical incompetent moderation, eh?

Anyway, it was down from Japan for quite a while. Then it came part way up, and eventually it seemed to be working again. I was actually composing some email most of the time, and didn't lose anything. (Pretty sure, anyway.)

In contrast to /., which tosses its cookies pretty often.

Re:Anti-Slashdot Effect

[Theovon]

This really isn't all that odd. "Y'all" may LOOK like a contraction of "You all" (because really, it is), but it has become lexicalized in several dialects of English. It now functions as a single word that is the standard second person plural personal pronoun.

So just as you can get "he'll", you can also get "Y'all'll". The GP misspelled it. :)

Re:Anti-Slashdot Effect

[Grishnakh]

Because your company and personal sandbox are valid representation of a mail system that serves millions of people. When either of your servers do that you can post bullshit like this.

The parent poster's simple little postfix system doesn't NEED to serve millions of people. That's a feature: by not needing the immense complexity that goes along with running a web-based email system serving millions of people, his system is smaller, simpler, and less prone to problems.

It's impressive that Google's Gmail runs as well as it does given its size, but smaller, simpler solutions are almost always preferable. For company email (especially in a small company, not some behemoth company with 100k employees needing lots of mail servers), it simply makes more sense to use a small, simple mail server like the parent's postfix system, rather than to rely on some external vendor's multimillion-user system. Especially since the software needed to run that system is all available for free.

Re:Anti-Slashdot Effect

[Registered Coward v2]

So, ya'll'll have to get a kick out of reading this, and just shake yer heads and mumble something about "that poor southern boy" and if you'd be so kind, drop a dollar in me alms cup as you pass by.

Grammar Yankee Alert

The proper plural, when referring to a group, is all'ya'll'll

Re:Anti-Slashdot Effect

[Grishnakh]

I know you're being sarcastic, but there's a point here:

If you want the most reliable treadmill, it probably makes more sense to buy your own than to use the one at your local gym. Even if they're the same brand and model, yours is going to get much less use, and last far longer than one which is shared by dozens of people every day. Of course, 24 Hour Fitness probably has a dozen of these treadmills so you can switch to another one if one fails, but that's a little different from Gmail which is a single system (running on multiple servers, but still linked together).

It's the same with email: your personal postfix server (say, one which you use to serve email to your 50-employee company) is probably going to have fewer problems than Gmail, simply because it's a much smaller, simpler system (don't forget, a simple postfix server doesn't have to run some fancy web app for people to read their email on, since they use a local email program to download their mails from the server). So the postfix server is probably going to be preferable for uptime and reliability, especially if you put it on a decent server with RAID.

The simple solutions always work best.

Re:Anti-Slashdot Effect

[Akzo]

The Facebook App MafiaWars is able to log you into GMail? Thanks for the update Anonymous Coward.

Re:Anti-Slashdot Effect

[SETIGuy]

And today, for instance, I was alerted to another situation by the angry cursing of my girlfriend as she attempted to log into her account.

How you can tell when a slashdotter is lying. A 6 digit ID and he claims to have a girlfriend.

Re:Anti-Slashdot Effect

[Belial6]

I would look at it this way. There is absolutely no excuse for 24 Hour Fitness to have a single hour were they do not have functioning treadmills.

Re:Anti-Slashdot Effect

[itlurksbeneath]

No kidding. The correct spelling would be y'all'll, since y'all is a contraction for you all.

Re:Anti-Slashdot Effect

[cyberzephyr]

Get over it. The web DOE'S go down every now and then. When i caught it i instantly thought "Google got DDos'd! :-) or :-(

It happens

Re:Anti-Slashdot Effect

[Kalriath]

The bit that annoys me, is that Google said MONTHS ago that they were making changes to hosted Gmail so that it WOULD be hosted in two geographically distinct datacentres so that in this sort of situation, the email would still be available for paid customers. Apparently, they meant "if we get around to it, and via POP3 only".

And to make it worse, their SLA is just a bit shit - for the several hour outage of EMAIL - a critical service to so many businesses these days, you get... 1 day free service, to a maximum of 15 days. Woopdeefuckingdoo.

Re:Anti-Slashdot Effect

[Trepidity]

Indeed, the proper English second-person plural pronoun is "yinz".

Re:Anti-Slashdot Effect

[rho]

Actually, "y'all" is inherently plural. Contrary to lazy movie writers, "y'all" is almost never used to refer to a single person. I say "almost never" because I have heard it used thusly once or twice. But those are the (very) rare exceptions. Bad bad grammar, if you will.

Foolish Yankees tend to think of "y'all" as some kind of Southern shibboleth, but like any good incantation it must be used in proper context.

Which is not to say that "all y'all'll" is not in common use. But in this case, "all" is used for emphasis, not to indicate plurality.

Re:Anti-Slashdot Effect

[Anonymous Coward]

Google has redundancy, failover, backups, and 24-hour on-call staff. I think you'll find that when something really DOES go wrong, Google is in a much better position to handle it than your simple postfix server.

What happens when you have a power outage? What happens if your ISP is down? Do you have backup generation and connectivity? If you do, how much did that cost you? Et cetera.

Re:Anti-Slashdot Effect

[Omestes]

Actually the rest of the world has the part of speech (second person plural) that "Ya'll" nothing but a cheap hack to fill in for. So I'm sure they understand it very well, though they might be perplexed as to why English lacks that somewhat important part of speech.

I remember taking Latin, and constantly running into second person plurals, and not being able to find a decent English translating to say, so I'd replace it with "Ya'll". By the end of the course our translations sounded very much like a red neck parody hour. Especially since calling ones wife "woman" was perfectly acceptable (as in "come to the gate, woman!")

Re:Anti-Slashdot Effect

[Omestes]

I think your wrong, or just being overly pedantic. "Ya'll" is translated 90% of the time as the second person plural, at least as far as my anecdotal evidence shows (and a quick Googleing). Being a good Midwesterner, though, I prefer "you'uns" or "you guys". "Ya'll" forces me to drawl, which annoys me.

Re:Anti-Slashdot Effect

[demonrob]

You obviously care since you replied. So I guess that's one person at least who cares.

Re:Anti-Slashdot Effect

[BrokenHalo]

For the rest of the world, even the English speaking world, "ya'll" isn't even a word.

s/even/especially/

Re:Anti-Slashdot Effect

[Nefarious Wheel]

I'm from from Texas and that even makes my head hurt.

Which part of Tejas? I understand there's a three syllable difference in the pronunciation of a common metabolic byproduct between the Panhandle and the Gulf.

Re:Anti-Slashdot Effect

[Nefarious Wheel]

I would look at it this way. There is absolutely no excuse for 24 Hour Fitness to have a single hour were they do not have functioning treadmills.

I would have to agree. Although how they use the treadmills in fault tolerant arrangements is important. Do they simply route people to a working treadmill, for example, when one fails? Or do they operate in an active-active clustering arrangement, where a person uses two treadmills simultaneously and fails over to a single treadmill when one stops? I imagine co-location of the treadmills would be a key success criterion in the latter configuration.

Re:Anti-Slashdot Effect

[BrokenHalo]

How you can tell when a slashdotter is lying. A 6 digit ID and he claims to have a girlfriend.

Yeah, right. My ID has 6 digits, and I've been married for 20 years. Plenty of time (if I were inclined towards mid-life crises) to get divorced and find another girlfriend.

Re:Anti-Slashdot Effect

[iocat]

Formal English lacks a distinct second person plural but it isn't just youse hicks in the South who try and put one back in. The Northeast version even has formal (youse) and informal (yis) forms, like French.

Re:Anti-Slashdot Effect

[thoughtfulbloke]

I'd've worded it differently

Re:Anti-Slashdot Effect

[drachenstern]

Yeah, I've run into other cultures having language constructs that English doesn't quite a bit; that may be why I don't mind making contractions when I know that the grammar should allow it. Never mind that the Grammar Nazi tend to jump all over me. :p

English does seem to have a few LARGE holes, doesn't it? At least languages evolve. Eventually. If this were the only place English was lacking it would be nice, but the language really could use a Version 2.0.

--

The "woman" part of the lessons appears to be classic. Out of curiosity, where were you taking those Latin classes? [HS|Uni:Name of Uni]

Re:Anti-Slashdot Effect

[drachenstern]

Ya'll does force a drawl, but that's if you don't already have a drawl. I tend to have a long drawl, but I talk really quickly, so I have to stop and make myself speak correctly when I address a large group. Even locals tend to lose me if they're not around me on a regular basis. So I smack my hand and move on.

I think the best option is for everyone to:
Learn to speak English with a drawl
Drink more lemonade and tea
Set on the front porch in the evenings after supper

This goes doubly for the ones who wanna start trouble ;)

Re:Anti-Slashdot Effect

[Anonymous Coward]

I dunno at work we were down for 2 days cause of a routing fuckup. GMail would look pretty awesome by comparision if they could only emulate an Exchange client and push to Blackberries.

Re:Anti-Slashdot Effect

[CoolCat]

How would you defend if hotmail was down? No much, I thought so.

Re:Anti-Slashdot Effect

[fucket]

DOE'S

A deer's?

Re:Anti-Slashdot Effect

[Magic5Ball]

Ya'll'd've'd a better chance to clue in on that if slashdot users didn't routinely apply their analytical skills to subjects that wouldn't otherwise receive slightly off-beat analysis.

Re:Anti-Slashdot Effect

[cyberzephyr]

Sorry,

I guess you DID not see my byline:

Oops! did i do that?

Re:Anti-Slashdot Effect

[Glendale2x]

No, no, no. You're doing it wrong. You're supposed to praise Google for offering such a generous SLA for your money.

Re:Anti-Slashdot Effect

[Anonymous Coward]

mmmm... japanese upskirt porn....
I suddenly decided what to do with the rest of the day

Re:Anti-Slashdot Effect

[meuhlavache]

working for me !

Re:Anti-Slashdot Effect

[turbidostato]

"but seem to have trouble with reading comprehension"

Well, I had problem with reading comprehension, but I don't think my reading comprehension was where you think it was.

English is not my mother language and I had to look twice (and even thrice) to ya'll to understand you meant "you all", but it seems it's you the one that didn't understand what I said: "other than here in the South this *word* sounds" heck, the problem is not how it sounds, the problem is that it's not even a word!

Re:Anti-Slashdot Effect

[Omestes]

Can I just stick with drinking bourbon on my porch? The Arizona and Wisconsin/Minnesota already conspire to make my vowels long enough!

Re:Anti-Slashdot Effect

[AthanasiusKircher]

Being a Yankee who lived in Texas for two years, I feel I need to say that it's not only Yankees who get confused about the grammatical status of "all y'all." I was told by at least two of my native Texan friends on separate occasions that "all y'all" is the plural of "y'all." They were both schoolteachers, so I assume they know what "plural" means.

On the other hand, my own empirical observation of usage is in line with what you said, i.e., the first "all" in "all y'all" is an intensifier. I noticed it being used in two primary circumstances: (1) when a group was unusually large, so the speaker wanted to emphasize "all" of the large group (perhaps applicable when making a Slashdot posting), or (2) when the emphasis was to be fully inclusive of all individuals, as in "every single one of you" as opposed to just a generic reference to "the group of you together."

Anyhow, while you're correct about usage, clearly even some (educated) Southerners think that "all y'all" is somehow a "plural" of "y'all," even if that is not the most accurate description of its usage. It's not just "foolish Yankees."

Re:Anti-Slashdot Effect

[Tibor the Hun]

That is funny, but as a Bosnian in Nebraska, I have to say it does parse properly.

Re:Anti-Slashdot Effect

[uncle slacky]

ITYM "The War of Northern Aggression"...

Re:Anti-Slashdot Effect

[uncle slacky]

AIUI, English at least *used* to have distinct singular and plural second person pronouns, namely "thou" (singular) and "you" (plural). "Thou", "thee" and "thine" survive in certain linguistic backwaters such as Yorkshire, for example.

Re:Anti-Slashdot Effect

[uncle slacky]

I'm impressed by the age of your Gmail account, seeing as it was launched in 2004...

Re:Anti-Slashdot Effect

[ChienAndalu]

it simply makes more sense to use a small, simple mail server like the parent's postfix system, rather than to rely on some external vendor's multimillion-user system. Especially since the software needed to run that system is all available for free.

Have you ever tried setting up one of these things? I am not a novice and I can setup web servers without much headache, but things like postfix and exim are very old and have weird configuration files with their own syntaxes

  The howtos you can find are literally hundreds of pages long and mostly outdated.

And if you have everything set up after two days, try adding a spam filter.

Re:Anti-Slashdot Effect

[Anonymous Coward]

...which, completely coincidentally, is Klingon for "a bunch of pansies".

Re:Anti-Slashdot Effect

[Registered Coward v2]

Foolish Yankees tend to think of "y'all" as some kind of Southern shibboleth, but like any good incantation it must be used in proper context

The proper term is Damnyankees

Next up, the proper use of the term "hey"

Re:Anti-Slashdot Effect

[Palshife]

Lived in Houston all my life, and ya'll is definitely not the spelling. Y'all is the correct contraction of "you" and "all."

Re:Anti-Slashdot Effect

[phoenixwade]

I don't expect the rest of the world to use the word, hence the wall-o-text explanation. HTH. YMMV. GTFO.

Besides - Here in the south we don't care how y'all do it.

Re:Anti-Slashdot Effect

[Anonymous Coward]

Best. Post. Ever.

Re:Anti-Slashdot Effect

[Anonymous Coward]

It does not 'simply make sense', especially in today's economy. There are lots of small organizations out there who have had to scale back IT employee resources, and who are moving away from 'small simple mail server[s]' to go to managed solutions.

My company's IT guys do not specialize in managing Exchange (or xyz open-source mail server) and don't ever want to. Even when we did run our own email, there were still outages. Google's corporate mail is very cheap when you factor in power costs, hardware costs, and the labor that goes into maintaining a mail server on your own.

Re:Anti-Slashdot Effect

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem with the attitude of a small company running their own server is it takes people to manage those resources. We have a company of less than 20 people. I am responsible for new product development and as one of the few computer literate users also responsible for in house IT. There is no way I could function and have to maintain all these servers. We outsource as many of the services as much as possible.

I would highly recommend a service like Google apps. We can use the benefits that a more sophisticated mail service offers, like access to email from anywhere via web, or access from smart phones. I know I could setup an in house system to do the same. I know I could do it with open source/free software, but that would be more that I would have to maintain.

Re:Anti-Slashdot Effect

[Anonymous Coward]

Hahahahahahahaha ...

it seems you are very out-dated! are you throwing exim and postfix into the same pot as sendmail? ...

i tell ya, configuring a postfix is really straight-forward if you now a little bit how the protocolls are working, hell, there are great postfix books which cover everything with nice little pictures and they are no big-monster books ...

who says things like this is NOT an administrator!

Re:Anti-Slashdot Effect

[Critical Facilities]

"Ya'll" is a colloquial contraction of "you will"

Speaking as someone who's spent most of his life in North Carolina, I can assure you, "y'all" is not a colloquial contraction of "you will". Rather it is a colloquial contraction of "you all". For example:

"Are y'all coming over for dinner tonight?" = "Are you all coming over for dinner tonight?"

Re:Anti-Slashdot Effect

[hesaigo999ca]

Just kick me in the head and get my life over with already....please!

Re:Anti-Slashdot Effect

[Anonymous Coward]

Works fine for me. I think the editor should have more closely reviewed this false alarm.

As in most cases it only affects a small part of users.

Nobody will have the full account until after Google resolves the problem and analyzes it.

Re:Anti-Slashdot Effect

[PainKilleR-CE]

Some people will address an individual as "y'all", though, despite most of us wanting to use "y'all" as a plural of "you".

In that sense, "all y'all" would be a plural of "y'all", though I generally concur that it's more common to here it used for emphasis rather than as a plural form, similar to the way people might use "all of you" as opposed to just "you" when asking a group of people to do something.

Re:Anti-Slashdot Effect

[PainKilleR-CE]

and I have no idea how I managed to use the wrong spelling for hear in the above post. WTF?

Re:Anti-Slashdot Effect

[PainKilleR-CE]

Most of the "holes" have been evolved out of the language, rather than there being any significant chance of it evolving to fill them. Almost every language that's had an influence on the English language had one or more of the missing features, and many of them even made it into English, but have long since been deprecated, as someone mentioned below with "thou", "thee", and "thine". Another instance would be the insistence on the part of some people to call certain objects "she" or "he" instead of "it", despite English having dropped the feminine and masculine references for objects.

Re:Anti-Slashdot Effect

[Anonymous Coward]

Because your company and personal sandbox are valid representation of a mail system that serves millions of people. When either of your servers do that you can post bullshit like this.

Hell, even the company I work for has outages for both proactive and reactive maintenance, and that's only for 5000 people.

To say that because you've never had an outage you never will have an outage is absurd.

In a previous position I handled pair of mail servers (clustered Solaris) that handled 90k accounts and we had three hours of scheduled down time a YEAR, usually between 1 and 4am on a weekend.

To me, you sound like a rank amateur.

Re:Anti-Slashdot Effect

[saintlupus]

Or "youse" (pronounced "yooz"), as in "youse guys".

Is that just a Western New York thing?

--saint

Re:Anti-Slashdot Effect

[ivucica]

I'm from Croatia, but still, don't insult people from random countries. You probably don't know any Bosnians, while I do.

Re:Anti-Slashdot Effect

[ivucica]

I think your wrong, or just being overly pedantic.

(and a quick Googleing)

*cough cough* say what?

"Your" and "you're" used improperly annoys even non-native speakers like me. Just like using "Googleing" (69,700) instead of usual "googling" (4,250,00). Reading that makes me want to dig my eyes out. Thanks.

Re:Anti-Slashdot Effect

[Anonymous Coward]

For company email (especially in a small company, not some behemoth company with 100k employees needing lots of mail servers), it simply makes more sense to use a small, simple mail server like the parent's postfix system, rather than to rely on some external vendor's multimillion-user system. Especially since the software needed to run that system is all available for free.

Really? I find it hard to believe that for a small company it's a better idea to do mail in house than using an outsourced solution. "Mail Server going down for patches" "Mail Server going down for hardware upgrades". I'd trust Google's fleet of sysadmins a lot more thna a single sysadmin working on a million different things for your small company

Re:Anti-Slashdot Effect

[danieltdp]

Before more users jump on the useless non-interesting "i care"/"i don't care" posts, don't do it. No one really cares.

Re:Anti-Slashdot Effect

[drachenstern]

Haha! I'll take it.

Re:Anti-Slashdot Effect

[Grishnakh]

You don't need to specialize in managing a mail server. Just download a decent Linux distro and set up an appropriate mail server and that's it.

This is just like when I set up a Bugzilla and Subversion server for my software group in a previous job, for a total cost of $2-3k. It wasn't my primary responsibility, as I was a software engineer, but it was easy to do in a few days and after that it didn't require much work. As long as you don't use some crappy Microsoft solution, you generally don't have to babysit this stuff once it's up and running.

As for power outages, that shouldn't be a big problem if you're a small organization, because if the server's power goes out, then likely your entire site's power has gone out as well, so no one in the company is going to be reading email at that time. And when was the last time your power went out at work anyway? I don't know about where you live, but where I live the only time power goes out is when there's a torrential storm. It's at most a once-in-a-year occurrence, if that; I can't even remember the last time my house's power went out.

Re:Anti-Slashdot Effect

[magnusrex1280]

That's silly. Half of my mother's family are Texans, and they often use "y'all" to refer to the person they're talking to, not just as a plural. Saying it's almost never used to refer to a single person implies that you've made extensive audio recordings of every person who actually uses "y'all", and analyzed them.

Re:Anti-Slashdot Effect

[Omestes]

Reading that makes me want to dig my eyes out. Thanks.

Please do, though blind people might see this as a curse, adding to the ASL and braille pedants out there.

Yes, I typed "your" as opposed to "you're", I accept this criticism, though I really should start doing it on purpose just for the amusing over reactions I get from pedants who really want to loft the "holier than thou" flag for whatever small reasons they have. Misusing your/you're is a common, and often innocuous, mistake. When typing fast, or typing things that really don't matter one bit, people generally default to the simpler version without even thinking of it, and being it is just a silly /. post, it isn't worth the bother of reviewing or fixing. If this mattered, I would have went back and fixed it, but as it stands, it wasn't worth the added second or two of my time.

If I lose the pedant crowd as my audience, so be it, 90% of people didn't notice, and of the 10% who did, 90% didn't care.

As for "Googleing" vs. "Googling", I don't find actually using hit results as relevant, or very good for the general cause of pedantry. How can you sit on the throne of linguistic elitism, but then use what the plebes do as proof? Also, in a less tongue and cheek vein, "Google" is a proper noun, so I'd prefer to leave the word intact, I understand that this is generally an awkward way of verbing a noun (which is a pretty dumb thing to do), but I doubt there is any hard-and-fast rules for this circumstance, being that verbing nouns is not generally acceptable in the first place.

Yes, I verbed the noun "verb", shoot me.

Re:Anti-Slashdot Effect

[Anonymous Coward]

Please do, though blind people might see this as a curse, adding to the ASL and braille pedants out there.

:-)

How can you sit on the throne of linguistic elitism, but then use what the plebes do as proof?

Linguists say language is a living thing. Italians is not the same as Latin. I'm not promoting elitism, I'm saying that some things hurt my eyes, that's all.

Also, in a less tongue and cheek vein, "Google" is a proper noun, so I'd prefer to leave the word intact

I suspected that. But it's not usually done, and looks fugly. Croatian language also features possibility for creating such awkward constructs, and some linguists tried to introduce them in '90s in an attempt to further separate Croatian from Serbian (which are quite similar).

 

being that verbing nouns is not generally acceptable in the first place.

As a foreigner, English speakers would have fooled me. I see it as something that happens quite often in English.

Yes, I verbed the noun "verb", shoot me.

Only if you insist, because I see no problem with verbing nouns, and especially with calling verbing for what it is.

Anyways, sorry if you felt flamed.

Re:Anti-Slashdot Effect

[ivucica]

No idea why that ended up as posted by AC. I'm logged in and the checkbox wasn't supposed to be checked.

Re:Anti-Slashdot Effect

[jesset77]

Yeah, wth man? You're trying to put a negative spin on recreation that truly lacks a downside. ;D

Re:Anti-Slashdot Effect

[mattmatt]

... Plenty of time (if I were inclined towards mid-life crises) to get divorced and find another girlfriend.

You're doing it wrong.

Re:Anti-Slashdot Effect

[Kamokazi]

On top of this, saying that google should "have a backup" is silly. Do you even understand how redundancy works? Do you even understand how web based mail systems work? I really don't think so from this comment. If the error has nothing to do with servers falling over and is an issue with routing then you can have all the redundancy you want, but it won't make a difference.

So some people took my comment a little more seriously than they should. Yes, I full-well understand redundancy, and web-based mail systems. My point is that they are fucking Google, and I would be willing to wager they have the most-visited website on the internet. While the complexity is on a whole other level, so are their resources and potential for redundancy. And had this been the first time in recent memory that they have had an outage, I would not have made my snarky comment. Everyone is entitled to the occasional fuckup. However, this has happened more than a few times over the past year. They have almost no excuse to not have multiple datacenters hosting Gmail in its entirety continuously updated with eachother (Yes, I understand that's not the simplest feat in the world, but it's doable). Within minutes of one having a problem, they should be able to update their DNS servers to redirect traffic to the others.

The only possible hangup I see is cost...in which case they can just say fuck the free users and only guarantee the redundancy for the paid ones.

Feel free to mod me down again for bashing your precious Google. I have plenty of karma to burn. All the positive moderations were starting to over-inflate my ego anyway.

Indeed

[pablodiazgutierrez]

So much for handing your email over to Google because it's more reliable than hosting locally...

Re:Indeed

[DSW-128]

I dunno - I've been using G-Mail and Google Apps since each was introduced, and this is the first time one of their outages has impacted me, or anyone else that I talk to (true, that's not a lot of people, but...).

Re:Indeed

[Anonymous Coward]

GMail is still consistently more reliable than our exchange server. And not by a little.

Re:Indeed

[tsotha]

Yeah, except that it has been extremely reliable. "Reliable" not being the same thing as "perfect".

Re:Indeed

[AlHunt]

If your email is that important, you'd better have some kind of redundancy and a backup plan in case the redundancy fails.

Re:Indeed

[GMFTatsujin]

No need to get cocky, kid.

I've used Google mail for years. This is the first outage I've heard of, and it hasn't even affected me. I can tell you the in-house exchange server at my company has caused for more trouble than this for our employees in the past 8 months.

Re:Indeed

[Nerdposeur]

I don't know. Our local email has gone down a few times since I've been here, and this is the first I've heard of Gmail being down.

Also our local email search sucks horribly. I can find a trivial personal message from 4 years ago on Gmail in a fraction of the time I can find suddenly-important work email from six months ago, if I find it at all.

Re:Indeed

[Anonymous Coward]

I think in general, a company specializing in hosting servers has a less likelihood than company X's IT department to screw up. In either case, outages will occur at some point.

Re:Indeed

[Twillerror]

Are you using Outlook 2007? Are you using Pine? My local email search works just fine thank you....and I can fing sort. Yes the search on the web is pretty good, but not the only thing email needs.

Not that I hate GMail, but I haven't used the web app in probably six months. Hooked it up to Outlook. I can search, sort, see complex HTML emails, and a whole lot of other things better.

GMail has been down several times for varying groups of people. That is always the weird thing. It never seems to be fully down...which is good and bad I guess.

Re:Indeed

[thetoadwarrior]

No one said it's perfect but internet mail services have had at least one or two downtimes and all of the online mail services have been more reliable than my company's mail server. I'd say Google's doing quite well to be honest.

Re:Indeed

[bjourne]

Lies, gmail has been down several times in the past many times for hours at a time. The difference between google and other service provides isn't the number of outages (gmail has more than even hotmail) it is how they are dealt with. E.g. the App Engine outage.

Re:Indeed

[HangingChad]

So much for handing your email over to Google

We handed our mail over and it's the first time I've ever had a problem with them as a corporate mail provider. Almost two years. There may have been one other short outage, but I don't remember it being during business hours.

I doubt you could run a mail server more reliably. And, for the difference in cost, I'd stay with Gmail.

Re:Indeed

[cailith1970]

This is the first outage I've heard of

Really? We had several outages that affected my old company, who was using it as their main email provider. No notice either for one scheduled outage, just "GMail is down for maintenance." Granted, we're in Australia so the times they took it down might have been fine in the US, but a notification would have been good beforehand.

Re:Indeed

[harmonise]

So much for handing your email over to Google because it's more reliable than hosting locally...

Yeah, because locally hosted servers never have problems or downtime. [rolls eyes]

Re:Indeed

[davidbrit2]

I see we have a volunteer for explaining that to a fuming exec that can't get his email at 5:00 PM.

Re:Indeed

[Anonymous Coward]

No problem. That'll be the same exec's that laid off the in-house staff and demanded IT costs are reduced.

Re:Indeed

[Anonymous Coward]

If only he had an iPhone of iPod Touch to check his GMail via pop/imap...

Re:Indeed

[ryanvm]

That was dumb. I have handed over our email because it's more reliable than hosting locally. This was the first time we've been affected in over a year and it was for a little more than an hour. That's an order of magnitude better uptime than we had before.

Can you beat Google's uptime? I doubt it. Sure, it's not impossible, but you won't be doing it for less than $50/user?

Re:Indeed

[gravos]

100% uptime is ridiculously hard to achieve.

I have been using gmail for years and it's still far more useful and reliable than any other competing service I've tried (including paid services!). When they lose some of my email or are totally down for a week, then I will start complaining. But I probably still wouldn't switch.

Re:Indeed

[frosty_tsm]

+1

This describes many smaller and even moderate-sized organizations. Every non-tech office I'm familiar with of suffers from frequent (compared to gmail) and severe (day long or multi-day) e-mail outages.

Re:Indeed

[GMFTatsujin]

Nope. It honestly IS the first outage I've heard of.

Admittedly, I have my head in the sand a lot. But I don't lie about it afterward. :)

Re:Indeed

[avandesande]

Except that instead of pulling your hair out to get it fixed you get to complain about it on slashdot.

Re:Indeed

[ryanvm]

No problem.

Hi Boss -

I'm the guy that switched our email service to Google. See, it only costs us $50/year/user and this has been the first outage in over year. We used to pay a full time sysadmin to manage the mail server and would average about 12-20 hours of total downtime per year (maintenance, outages, etc.).

Obviously, the switch to Google has been much better for the corporate bottom line. Not to mention that we also get calendaring, wiki/sites, docs, and chat for the same price.

Ah, I'm glad you understand. You have a nice evening too.

Re:Indeed

[interkin3tic]

Ditto, the team of geniuses/smart people working at google are frankly far better at their job than Bob, our IT guy. Bob's nice and all, but, well, he's not exactly google material, and there's only one of him, etc. Gmail goes down once, Bobmail goes down once a week.

Re:Indeed

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

So much for handing your email over to Google

We handed our mail over and it's the first time I've ever had a problem with them as a corporate mail provider. Almost two years. There may have been one other short outage, but I don't remember it being during business hours.

I doubt you could run a mail server more reliably. And, for the difference in cost, I'd stay with Gmail.

Just wanted to add that despite GMail's outage, POP was still working. Email on my iPhone was working the whole time, for example.

As far as outages go, that was pretty derned tame.

Re:Indeed

[Anonymous Coward]

BUT I CAN'T ACCESS MY DAILY TRANNY PICS THAT I GET BY EMAIL EVERYDAY!

Filter error: Don't use so many caps. Filter error: Don't use so many caps.

Re:Indeed

[drachenstern]

Same here - I've heard a lot of others complain about outages, but this was the first to hit me.

I also know about six other people all in the US and all were hit by this bug within 15 minutes or so, for about an hour.

Re:Indeed

[timeOday]

So much for handing your email over to Google because it's more reliable than hosting locally...

Ah, you must be one of those guys I heard about, who drives instead of flying because you've noticed more news coverage of airline wrecks than car crashes.

Re:Indeed

[Facegarden]

I'm the guy that switched our email service to Google. See, it only costs us $50/year/user and this has been the first outage in over year...

Well, actually they had an outage in Feb of this year. And in May.

But they are awesome generally, I think their uptime over the past couple years has been beyond 99.99% or something crazy good.
-Taylor

Re:Indeed

[Anonymous Coward]

Ryan,

I appreciate your enthusiasm but you are fired. What you fail to realize is that this unplanned outage has cost the company a critical deal that was worth billions.

Re:Indeed

[bhartman34]

I think it depends how you use it. I have a friend who uses it via IMAP, and he does nothing but complain about it. I use POP3 over the Web interface, and I've had maybe 3 incidents over 4 years or so.

If you don't care about IMAP, I think it works okay. If you do, then (in my experience), it's a little dicier.

Re:Indeed

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, ok, because billion dollar deals only hinge on email. Nobody EVER does those face to face...

Oh, and they have time limits too, don't they?

Re:Indeed

[paulius_g]

Why is the parent modded funny? I think it's an honest comment. I've been using Gmail for 5 years now (precisely since September 2004) and this is only the second outage that I've experience which prevented me from logging in.

The only thing that bugs me is the Gmail user interface. Sometimes it doesn't record my actions (such as reading messages) and has an indefinite "Loading..." message which forces me to reload the whole page. But, this could also be something related to Safari.

Re:Indeed

[RiotingPacifist]

GMail is still consistently more reliable than our exchange server. And not by a little.

That's your problem there sir.

Re:Indeed

[mgblst]

Our email sucks, our admins are a joke. We run exchange, but for the first few months we would have to reset all the setting to get it to work, everytime we switched off the computer. We stopped doing it very often.

Now, we only have to enter our login details everytime, since for some reason, clicking that little box to remember my details on outlook doesn't actually do anything. Fuck you microsoft and your shitty software.

Also, I enjoy the fact that it takes a minute to search through 1000 emails, but gmail, which if on the web, can search through >10,000 instantly.

Re:Indeed

[toby]

This is the first outage I've heard of

It is not the first prolonged Gmail outage.

Re:Indeed

[betterunixthanunix]

Except that instead of affecting one organization, this outage is affecting hundreds at a time.

Re:Indeed

[Anonymous Coward]

True. First time for me also and I have been using since it was introduced. I've had numerous corporate business accounts that are much more unreliable. It happens. Not really news worthy other than "oooh noooooz, GMail is not perfect!"..... just like my spelling. Nothing to see here. Move along.

Re:Indeed

[im_thatoneguy]

There's the trouble of overlap however:

We've had longer outages locally... but we're a small company so when the exchange went out it took everything out with it: exchange, domain and by extension of domain--file servers.

While we may have had 3-4 hours or so of domain related outages this year they were times when we couldn't do anything anyway. We've never had JUST our exchange go out since it's on the same system as our domain.

If Gmail goes out for 2 hours and we have 4 hours of general down time per year then the Gmail (despite being more reliable) actually increased our email down time by 50% over hosting locally.

Re:Indeed

[im_thatoneguy]

You can even do one better.

Hi Boss -

Google predicts that normal service will be resumed in 1.5 hours. If you are in need of email immediately I can get you limited access in about 10 minutes. [ed note: pop 3 and imap is still available so you could setup an outlook account or other pop3 system very quickly]

I'm the guy... ... Ah I'm glad you understand. You have a nice evening too.

Re:Indeed

[Fastolfe]

If you're doing business deals "worth billions", that critically hinge on the availability of e-mail, you can probably afford to buy and maintain a hyper-available e-mail infrastructure. For those of us that participate in the real world, this is not an issue. It's an inconvenience that can be worked around (with POP3 or IMAP, or by taking an early lunch).

Re:Indeed

[shanen]

You ask why the parent was modded funny? See my sig--and karma.

Actually, I did see something funny on /. a few days ago. Oh wait. It was just a link to somewhere else. Doesn't count on the /. credit side.

Maybe /. could have gotten indirect credit, except the moderators were not competent enough to mod the linking post as funny. Sorry, you moron moderators, but I only found it because the poster described it as a funny link.

So you say you read /. for the timely technical news, not the pictures? For this story, you might as well be reading such innovative leaders as the Washington Post, a truly old MSM horse. In tribute to the old meme with the goat, I should post a link to a close up of a gift horse's mouth--but /. isn't worth that much research time.

Nomad said the Enterprise was flawed but could be repaired. Unfortunately /. is clearly beyond the miraculous curative powers of Nomad. I'm sure he'd just pull the plug.

"Flawed. Imperfect. Must sterilize. Sterilize..."

Re:Indeed

[Fastolfe]

Why does it matter that the outage affects multiple organizations? If you're studying the reliability of an e-mail service (presumably to decide whether or not you want to invest in a local e-mail infrastructure, or use someone else's), shouldn't you care more about the reliability of that service as provided to you? What's the difference between you having X hours of downtime a year, versus you and 1000 other organizations having X hours of downtime a year? How is the latter worse for you?

Re:Indeed

[navyjeff]

So much for handing your email over to Google because it's more reliable than hosting locally...

This is still far more reliable, more convenient, and more powerful than my University's e-mail system, Hotmail, Yahoo mail and others I've had. If similar outages happened once a week, I would still stick with it.

Re:Indeed

[Grishnakh]

Bad example. That's like saying a State police department motor pool has fewer breakdowns in all its cars than your single Yugo. Of course, since the Yugo is such a POS.

Get a real email server (like postfix) and you won't have that problem.

Re:Indeed

[Grishnakh]

The problem is so many companies run Exchange and Outlook, which are complete pieces of shit.

I use Outlook/Exchange at my current job, and just reading a single email can frequently take 30-60 seconds (it takes that long to show up after clicking on it). Luckily, I don't have to read much email as an engineer, or I'd go mad.

Re:Indeed

[Anonymous Coward]

365 * 24 = 8760hrs/year "99.99% uptime" = 8759.124

So to meet 99.99% uptime, you have to have less than 52 minutes of downtime, total, planned and unplanned, in a year. That's really hard. Really. Think about it, few enterprise systems can rarely do that (Peoplesoft update in 50 minutes? HA!). But here, a 1.2hr outage puts them firmly out of the four nines club.

Re:Indeed

[tsotha]

Not only that, if everyone else is using gmail you won't be able to contact your customers anyway.

Re:Indeed

[whoop]

But, what about the business that just signed up with Google three hours ago? They've already had 33% of their time down. That's horrible. I don't know why anyone would use them with that record.

Think of the children!

Re:Indeed

[Anonymous Coward]

What better time to have an email outage than when hundreds of companies and millions of personal email accounts are unable to send you email? It sucks to be the only one experiencing an outage. You have to explain to people why you either didn't receive their emails or were not able to reply in a timely manner. For everyone affected by today's outage, there's a very simple explanation for why email was down.

Re:Indeed

[contrapunctus]

also, if your email is that important, you'd better have some kind of redundancy and a backup plan in case the redundancy fails.

Re:Indeed

[Kalriath]

How is Exchange not a real email server. For some reason, I've never had an outage of Exchange except that one time the power supply caught fire. Am I doing it wrong?

Re:Indeed

[BattleApple]

That's interesting.. I've been using Gmail/IMAP/Thunderbird since IMAP became available and haven't had any problems that I can recall. Also been using IMAP on the iphone for 2 years with no problems

Re:Indeed

[bhartman34]

That's good to know. Maybe he's just trying to do something funky with it, then...

Re:Indeed

[kickme_hax0r]

The webhost I use (that will remain nameless) has pretty close to (if not more than) 99.99% uptime. This is on a shared host as well. The worst I get is about a minute down each month as the server gets power cycled.

Re:Indeed

[cerberusss]

Hi Boss -- I'm the guy that switched our email service to Google. See, it only costs us $50/year/user and this has been the first outage in over year...

Well, actually they had an outage in Feb of this year. And in May. But they are awesome generally, I think their uptime over the past couple years has been beyond 99.99% or something crazy good.
-Taylor

Could you two just, like, wrap it up and continue in the office?

Re:Indeed

[drachenstern]

You obviously had the power supply fire moments after booting the server, and haven't replaced the power supply yet. That's probably the best idea. Sacrifice a virgin Exchange server to the server room, and leave it's charred ashes as a measure of penitence.

I applaud you and your willingness to set an example. You sir win +1 Internets.

-- I'll try again.

Yeah, you're supposed to hook up the network cables too. (similarly bad version: How do you know if an Exchange server is going to cause problems? It's connected to the internet.)

--I'll try again.

Your email server has a GUI? GAHHHH, the googles, they do nothing!

--I'll not try again. Those were all lousy.

Full disclosure: I actually babysit an Exchange server as part of a SBS 2k3 domain. In 30 days I won't be (there). I don't know if I plan to char the carcass of that beast when I do leave tho, so let's see what the 30th has in store, shall we?

Crap, I guess I gotta start emailing people now and telling them about the transition, huh? Stupid server...

Re:Indeed

[drachenstern]

What the hell did your IT group do wrong? I have never had Outlook take 30 seconds to show me an email in my life. I've used Outlook since 1997.

Granted, if you haven't started it yet, that could take about a minute depending on hard drive speed and RAM.

Sounds like you have a whole other problem. I bet your workstation has Norton installed, doesn't it?

Re:Indeed

[drachenstern]

I am pretty sure that TRWTF in that situation is your admins. A properly setup and administered AD doesn't have the problem you're talking about with logging in every time, but a misconfigured network does.

Re:Indeed

[drachenstern]

You're confusing cause and effect. Presumably your organization is running on Windows Small Business Server (IT people shudder when they hear that name for a reason) and so when Exchange goes down, it does cause problems for SBS, and vice versa.

However, if you take Exchange out of the equation, or if you give it nothing to do, then all your domain problems go away. Now instead of having 4 hours of downtime you get about 1 hour every three years. (that's been about my experience overall with Gmail, of course YMMV).

With SBS, if Exchange has a problem, everyone has a problem. With SBS, if Exchange is neutered, you have a LOT less problems.

Re:Indeed

[Grishnakh]

Sounds like you have a whole other problem. I bet your workstation has Norton installed, doesn't it?

No, it doesn't have that, but it does use Novell for some strange reason.

What the hell did your IT group do wrong?

With these guys, there's no telling.

Re:Indeed

[Captain Electrode]

I like the 'check external email' GMail feature. Lets me use all of the advanced features and functions, and when GMail tanks, I still have access on my domain's servers. I might not be able to send mail using goog's servers, but everything still gets thru to me, and sending's unimpeded. Yawn.

Re:Indeed

[dbcad7]

Actually that works out great.. obviously, if one organization can't receive mail, it is beneficial that the other organizations can't send mail. This way no mail is in "limbo", as it has not been sent or received.. response times are saved..

On a more serious note.. I once relied on Excite as my primary email.. Reliable for years,, then they went all wacko, and changed to a java based email run by some outfit called "bluetie'.. 45 DAYS.. it took to fix it.. 45 DAYS ! .. Lesson learned, and Excite which was once my homepage, is an afterthought bookmark somewhere.

Re:Indeed

[Anonymous Coward]

I just moved from Google Apps to hosted Exchange. Google is just not ready. Link's are encoded incorrectly on the Blackberry Storm phone. Their support takes days to respond.. One of our users sent out a marketing email (to a bunch of clients). Google banned her account for 24 hours. There was no way to get it unblocked before then and the suggestion was next time split it up over multiple accounts. This response was of course 3 days after it happened.

How mediocre.

Re:Indeed

[noidentity]

The fact that a few-hour outage is big news is a testament to how reliable gmail has been. Like you say, apparently people feel that a service that covers a wider area should have less downtime than a smaller one, to the point that one that covers the global should have zero downtime.

Re:Indeed

[asylumx]

I dunno - I've been using G-Mail and Google Apps since each was introduced, and this is the first time one of their outages has impacted me, or EVERYONE else that I talk to (true, that's not a lot of people, but...).

Fixed that for you...

Re:Indeed

[asylumx]

That may be true, but when a SaaS solution like this drops even for an hour, it means millions of people can't get their email. When my company's exchange server drops (which is actually just as reliable as gmail is), my company loses their email service (~18,000 people), but the rest of the world is fine.

There is something to be said for having local instances vs. the cloud -- reliability expectations for a globally hosted solution like this are simply higher.

Re:Indeed

[haruchai]

I see we have a volunteer for explaining that to a fuming exec that can't get his email at 5:00 PM.

We suffered through 3 months of 3-times-a-week outages when our outsourced Exchange mail was maintained by a
large company with initials similar to Harry Potter. I can only recall about 3 or 4 significant Gmail outages in nearly 5 years
and new, mostly useful features keep appearing for free whereas the aforementioned company would nickel, dime and dollar
us to death for every damn request.

Not to mention that I can search search my 10,000+ message / 3 Gb Gmail archive 100 times faster than my cached Exchange
store that's only 1000 messages / 100 Mb and Gmail doesn't get confused by commas.

If your exec can't see which is a better value for the money he's not spending, he deserves a lead parachute

Re:Indeed

[Anonymous Coward]

- But we have 10,000 employees, you're telling me we pay half a million dollars for email for 10,000 people which we used to be able to provide for just the cost of one sysadmin?

You're fired.

Re:Indeed

[Anonymous Coward]

Yea, well they offer 99.9 not 99.99 which gives them 8.76 hours of downtime per year on average. Since the entire system is rarely completely down. There is also plenty of additional room for interpretation on the impact of the outage. Three nines is plenty for email, IMO.

Re:Indeed

[xkcdFan1011011101111]

Ummmm, gmail has only been down for me twice in the past year. Contrast that with my university locally-hosted email which has been down over eight times this year...

Re:Indeed

[tompeach]

Can you beat Google's uptime? I doubt it. Sure, it's not impossible, but you won't be doing it for less than $50/user?

Exactly, I challenge anybody on here to claim that they have achieved better uptime than Gmail, since 2004, with their corporate mail service. Don't forget that planned maintanence counts for downtime.

Re:Indeed

[acoustix]

I have. No, I'm not lying. I get 5 9's uptime on my Exchange cluster every year. Plus, my user's get more features.....but don't let me rain on your parade.

Re:Indeed

[khchung]

When your email service is out, isn't it even better if those you communicate with also have their email service out too?

That way, during the outage, no one will send you email you cannot receive, and no one will expect to read your email replies which you cannot send.

Re:Indeed

[Anonymous Coward]

I have found SBS to be fine for small businesses; if you have another file server, it can be a backup domain controller, so there's no need for everything to come to a halt if there's an Exchange problem. I ran SBS 2000 for 5+ years and the only times I had problems were when we'd hit the 16gb database limit; now that we're on SBS 2008 that won't be an issue and I expect downtime to be maybe one reboot a month at a time of my choosing. That's not a problem in a small business.

Re:Indeed

[Anonymous Coward]

Excellent, good for you, is the ability to search through 20,000 messages in under a second amongst those features?

Re:Indeed

[Phurd Phlegm]

I have. No, I'm not lying. I get 5 9's uptime on my Exchange cluster every year. Plus, my user's get more features.....but don't let me rain on your parade.

Five nines is no more than 31 seconds per year of downtime. How do you even measure that? Presumably, not with a tool provided by the vendor. You sure couldn't rely on user reports.

Re:Indeed

[Reservoir Penguin]

When our systems go down I can yell at our sysadmins and usually get it fixed ASAP. In this case I would be at the mercy of some faceless coroporatiion.

Re:Indeed

[Anonymous Coward]

You had a full time sysadmin that did nothing but manage the mail server? No wonder gmail looks like a bargain to you.

Re:Indeed

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, because on every company that I've worked on, with sizes ranging from 50 people to 10000 people, I've never seen an outage due to Exchange or some other mail system or even the infrastructure that supports it...the thing just keeps on running without ever failing or giving users grief, it's impressive! And really cheap too!

Re:Indeed

[Anonymous Coward]

Uptime:

14:41:23 up 487 days, 12:04

Suck it Google!

Re:Indeed

[sciencewhiz]

You may be able to use Google desktop to search your email, which is very convenient.

Re:Indeed

[samwichse]

Posting to undo accidental moderation.

Re:Indeed

[Anonymous Coward]

Two things: 1) Whoever is running your network doesn't know what they are doing. 2) Get Xobni at www.xobni.com.

Re:Indeed

[drachenstern]

Troll != lame attempt at humor. Someone please inform the mods...

Doh! I must be new here...

But if anyone besides my PP is reading this later, and can still comment, please tell me how it's an outright troll (of course the PP could answer as well).

Wow

[tsotha]

Someone's gonna get fired over this.

Re:Wow

[GMFTatsujin]

Or someone will get congratulated and promoted. It depends on the response to diagnose and fix the issue, whatever it is. Major outages aren't always the fault of some apocryphal guy asleep at the switch.

Re:Wow

[jellomizer]

Why would you fire the guy who caused it. He would probably be the most carful employee after that. People learn from mistakes firing people even for big mistakes isn't a solid business model and bad HR.

Re:Wow

[Gospodin]

That'd be a good name for a superhero: Apocryphal Guy. You always hear about his exploits but never actually see them.

Lemme call up Marvel. I mean, Disney.

Re:Wow

[JumpDrive]

I doubt it. Once you get out of high school and work in the real world, you'll find that just because something happens, people don't always get fired.
Why, because usually you'll be firing one of your best employee's a 20 percenter, one of the ones that actually does the work and knows what is going on. And even if it wasn't a 20 percenter , you don't want to send out the message, that if you do something and it causes a problem you're going to get fired.

I can hear it now, "Remember Bob, he was like us, then one day he went out and did something, something went wrong, so they shit canned him. That was five years ago and we haven't done anything since."

Re:Wow

[moro_666]

I second that :)

Most likely nobody gets fired for this. You can't just pick new gmail level developers and administrators up from the streets. But work collisions like this will always happen if you go past some size in the company. Google just has to improve it's procedures so it wouldn't happen at this scale again.

Re:Wow

[nbates]

Or, he will be more sloppy because he knows there won't be any repercussions.

Instead, if I fire him, that will mean the other employees will be extra careful and learn from the fired one mistake.

Playing devil's advocate here...

Re:Wow

[ImprovOmega]

Yes, because one accidental screw-up is exactly the same as systematic epic fails in security design and practice. You get a gold star!

Re:Wow

[jellomizer]

So when there is a mistake there will just be finger pointing. Not fixing the problem.

Re:Wow

[nbates]

Or both finger pointing and solving the problem.

Re:Wow

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow, such insight. You should really give more advice on a variety of subjects.

• One of your dogs pees in the house? Kill him immediately in front of the other dogs, that will teach them to be more careful!
• Someone dials 911 for a non-life-threatening emergency? Run 'em over with an ambulance and televise it, that'll teach people!
• One of your kids breaks a window while playing baseball in the front yard? Drop him off on a street corner downtown, that'll teach those fucking kids to behave!

If you'll excuse me, I have some users whose computers I need to piss on. They submitted some bug tickets and someone needs to teach these users to be extra careful about using my software.

Not surprising

[Caustic Soda]

I don't know that this is actually news-worthy. I have never worked for a company which has not suffered email outages, no matter how their email is supported. Granted, GMail has a large list of client companies, but you are a fool of the highest order if you think the name will protect you from outages.

Re:Not surprising

[Anonymous Coward]

but why the outage affected clients & employees all the same time? Is this one big giant cloud in googleland? Probably not very wise if that is the case...

Re:Not surprising

[moon3]

They have state of the art redundancy (I presume), and they have been extremely reliable so far. So this is really IS surprising and interesting. Hopefully nothing major happened to Google's infrastructure. I even opened CNN to see whether some 9/11 event is not in progress or something... GOOD thing they are back online now.

Re:Not surprising

[TheRealFixer]

I think the real story here is that it outlines the downside to moving everything to The Cloud, as a lot of people are trying to promote these days. As you said, email outages are pretty common even at large enterprises. The difference is, CIOs like to be able to go and yell at someone in their office for an outage, and know that it's being worked on in some measurable fashion. They don't like it when your answer is, "I don't know what's going on. Ask Google."

The Cloud is great, as long as it always works. But, in my experience, downtime is far less tolerated in hosted solutions than it is in on-site infrastructure. And stories like this make executives nervous about this stuff.

Re:Not surprising

[Avalain]

Arguably what makes this story so newsworthy is that it made the news. GMail has been so reliable that having it go down is interesting.

Re:Not surprising

[drachenstern]

This is front-page worthy because it let's us all know that we're not losing our frigging individual minds over this, that it IS a collective problem. The fact that google knew what the problem was and fixed it before it had time to hit the frontpage of /. just goes to show that they are trying and they do care.

Personally, this just renews my confidence in Goog, regardless of what the twats are doing inside the beltway...

Re:Not surprising

[kindbud]

The difference is, CIOs like to be able to go and yell at someone in their office for an outage, and know that it's being worked on in some measurable fashion. They don't like it when your answer is, "I don't know what's going on. Ask Google."

That's a pretty poor answer to give him, when you should have had Google's answer for him already.

Re:Not surprising

[Anonymous Coward]

I think most CIOs probably realize the team of Google engineers working to get their e-mail system back up are a few orders of magnitude than the schmuck they pay $60k to order new workstations off dell.com for them.

Re:Not surprising

[TCook]

Exactly. Now do this with your health records. ????? I think not!

http://www.linkedin.com/in/timothywaynecook

Re:Not surprising

[Anonymous Coward]

I think you're giving "most CIOs" way too much credit. They just want stuff to work, doesn't matter if the people who screwed up have Ph.Ds or GEDs.

Re:Not surprising

[Fastolfe]

Why is Google Health special? Does it matter more that outages could affect your Google Health profile? Are you under the belief that emergency departments will scramble to pull up your Google Health profile before starting emergency treatment, and that, if the page were to fail to come up, they'd all sit around, pull at their hair, and keep hitting Reload until you died?

Re:Not surprising

[apoc.famine]

Downside? This is a fucking UPSIDE!
 
Before, it was "I sent you that order HOURS ago! Why the HELL haven't you processed it?!?!?!"
Now it's, "Damn, your email was out too?"
 
The more people who move into the Gmail cloud, the less likely it is that only one side has an issue with their email.

Re:Not surprising

[whoop]

That is the sort of image the President wants Americans to believe. Everyone in healthcare is incompetent, corrupt, etc. Only He can save you if you get sick, not the evil doctor who just wants to take your tonsils out to buy another Lamborghini.

If these pesky people don't get in his way, everything would be just right [or is it left?].

Re:Not surprising

[ajlisows]

I don't know, CIO's liking to go yell at someone in their own office may be something for really really large companies, but my experience has been different. I have worked for mainly small to medium sized organizations and I have found that in general the higher ups have more faith in what a large company like Google tells them and their ability to fix the problem than they do the guys under their control. They can yell at said guy and fire him but that is about it. With a big corporation backing a service, they can yell at an entire chain of command and threaten to switch away from their product and sue for lost revenue. You can't really sue a guy you just fired for lost revenue and expect to actually get money for it.

Re:Not surprising

[KDEWolf]

But... what to do when GOOGLE is down?!?

Re:Not surprising

[ColdWetDog]

if the page were to fail to come up, they'd all sit around, pull at their hair, and keep hitting Reload until you died?

Naw, we'd just play Solitaire.

Re:Not surprising

[edumacator]

I don't use gmail at my company, but I'm interested, aren't the effects of this marginalized by the offline access available in gmail now?

Shouldn't most people still have the ability to read email already downloaded and to write emails that will be sent when the service comes back up?

I agree that cloud computing has it's difficulties, but it seems that offline access options are starting to mitigate these problems.

Re:Not surprising

[asylumx]

No, instead they'd use a treatment which you have severe allergy too and kill you with your own reaction to it...

Re:Not surprising

[asylumx]

You must be new here... Stories often take days to hit SlashDot's front page.

Re:Not surprising

[xkcdFan1011011101111]

I think the story is also that a *lot* of people are moving everything to just a few clouds. Gmail is great, but if everyone is on it and gmail goes down for an extended period of time, what effects would that have on our economy, society, etc?

Re:Not surprising

[Fastolfe]

In other words, you're exactly as well off as you would be without Google Health in the first place, right?

Re:Not surprising

[Anonymous Coward]

You are kind of contradicting yourself. How is this a downside of The Cloud?

It's clearly the upside! The fact that a one hour outage hits the news is quite impressive! It shows that it's a rare enough event to be news worthy.

I'm back up as of now

[kalpol]

It always worked on my iphone too, through Beejive.

Just a guess, but

[t33jster]

It seems like it might be a DDOS attack. I was asked to pass through a CAPTCHA and I made it in. Try this link: https://mail.google.com/mail/?shva=1#inbox

Re:Just a guess, but

[Kagura]

WTF how did you get access to my gmail account?

Re:Just a guess, but

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow that's amazing. We have all the same contacts.

Re:Just a guess, but

[Anonymous Coward]

WTF how did you get access to my gmail account?

Your mother told me your password last night when we were makin' out

Re:Just a guess, but

[fafi]

You a gerontophiliac?

Re:Just a guess, but

[martas]

he just typed ******, and it showed up as your email account in your browser.

Working now

[Drakin020]

It came back up for me about 10 minutes ago.

Good job, /.

[pablodiazgutierrez]

Great job slashdotting my email, dammit.

Re:Good job, /.

[Howard Beale]

What do you mean, I can get into your email just fine. BTW - call your mom, she misses you.

Re:Good job, /.

[larry bagina]

I got into his mom ... I'll let her know personally.

I got in...

[Anonymous Coward]

If anyone cares, I had no problem logging in just now from Toronto (Canada).

Nooo!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

The cloud is falling! The cloud is falling!!

Although my Thunderbird access to Google Apps works fine. :)

Gmail's back

[Dragonshed]

Not to belittle the editorial staff, but gmail was back up and running before the story was posted publically

Re:Gmail's back

[MoralHazard]

Oh, and you checked alll of Google's server to be sure? Or did you randomly sample from a couple of hundred different points on the Internet?

Not to belittle the parent poster, but I think he thinks the world revolves around him.

Re:Gmail's back

[Anonymous Coward]

But now twitter seems to be down. Any connection?

Re:Gmail's back

[Flea of Pain]

and the burden of proof lies on you to prove it doesn't!

Re:Gmail's back

[mrjohnson]

Maybe it'll be relevant when they post it again tomorrow.

Also working in the mobile app

[R2.0]

As of the time of this posting, Gmail Mobile is working.

Android working fine here

[lothos]

My G1 Android phone is working fine, I'm still able to access and receive gmail.

Is it so unusual?

[neonprimetime]

The unusual thing about this is that our Google phone support rep (which paid accounts get) indicated that this outage is also affecting Google employees as well

Doesn't everybody use gmail or related items in some way shape or form during the day?

Re:Is it so unusual?

[edraven]

Probably not those of us who run our own mail servers... and aren't Google. :)

Some hates cloud computing.

[Anonymous Coward]

When its a cloud ... expect it to rain.

Dell.com

[Anonymous Coward]

At the same time Dell.com has been down. Made me wonder if it was just a bad day for computers, or someone attacking companies.

It's spotty

[bobdehnhardt]

As I type this, I can get in to GMail just fine, but a friend in Texas can't (I'm in Nevada). Guess Google likes us better.

And kudos to the Google team for updating the status when they say they will. Looks like the script they use automatically puts current time + 1 hour in as the default next update time, and they're posting updates before that expire. Too many times, something simple like that gets overlooked.

Re:It's spotty

[war4peace]

...or maybe they don't. Their mail app status page, located at http://www.google.com/appsstatus#rm=1&di=1&ddo=1&hl=en is about 19 minutes behind. I was unable to access Google Mail for about 1+ hour, I was half-way into posting the story myself on slashdot, but then mail service came back up so I ceased editing. Anyway, I feel the news is worth posting, as Google Mail is used by a huge amount of individuals and companies alike.

Re:It's spotty

[trybywrench]

I'm in Texas and it just started working for me

Re:It's spotty

[TheQuantumShift]

Well he is in Texas after all, obviously his mailbox is just bigger. Give it some time.

Dell.Com Also

[Anonymous Coward]

DELL.Com is down also.. how funny is that

I must be uncharacteristically lucky, then

[blind biker]

..'cause Gmail works perfectly for me, and has been working just fine the whole day. Does the fact that I am in Finland have anything to do with Gmail not going down?

Re:I must be uncharacteristically lucky, then

[vigmeister]

Was down for me in Seoul. West coast troubles perhaps?

Re:I must be uncharacteristically lucky, then

[__aasqbs9791]

I'm in Oregon and haven't seen any problems today. I didn't see any problems the last time this was mentioned either.

bored today?

[Anonymous Coward]

*snore* ... now we are going to see an article by every "tech" writer on the big outage. CNET is probably working overtime as we speak to get this important news out to the readers!

After all, Google is always experiencing these outages and the other options for hosted email and web apps have a 100% uptime.

ok ok... end sarcasm.

no problem here

[ThePeices]

Works fine for me.

Re:no problem here

[tftp]

It was broken for me for at least 3 hours this morning.

Been out over an hour +

[timpdx]

but now back, in California

Fixed now

[MrMista_B]

At least, it seems to be fixed on the west coast of Canada.

Depend on something... pay for admin

[johnjones]

I think Gmail is a great service for personal accounts...

but for business sorry you need to pay a real live person or support company who will actually be able to deal with your data

how do you get the data out of gmail to switch providers ?

ever serviced a discovery litigation from google ?
(you know where they judge you guilty of you dont come up with the data)

sorry but there is a good reason to keep this stuff on site and working...

regards

John Jones

Re:Depend on something... pay for admin

[jesdynf]

ever serviced a discovery litigation from google?

No. Have you?

Re:Depend on something... pay for admin

[Anonymous Coward]

.. Simply use a mail gateway..

http://www.google.com/support/a/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=60730

Was that so hard?

Re:Depend on something... pay for admin

[jcausey]

Feel like I'm feeding a troll, but johnjones's ID is so low that I feel this silliness may be taken seriously:

how do you get the data out of gmail to switch providers ?

Same way you would do any remote hosted email migration. POP and IMAP. Additional tools are provided for Google Apps (their for-pay version).

ever serviced a discovery litigation from google ? (you know where they judge you guilty of you dont come up with the data)

sorry but there is a good reason to keep this stuff on site and working...

Umm, an hour of downtime doesn't mean your data is gone. I'll also echo earlier comments -- locally hosted email generally has more problems, as no company but the largest enterprise has the same magnitude of IT equipment and experience as Google.

I've never really understood why so many Slashdotters have this attitude about hosted services. Perhaps they are local IT folks for smaller companies, and fear for their jobs?

Re:Depend on something... pay for admin

[Anonymous Coward]

"but for business sorry you need to pay a real live person or support company who will actually be able to deal with your data"
Pay Google for a Premium account. They'll even answer the phone.

"how do you get the data out of gmail to switch providers ?"
  google offers imap/pop support which is how many users migrated mail into google, should work on the way out....

"ever serviced a discovery litigation from google ?"
You can enable postini with message discovery, paid service yes, but essentially answers your last question......

Re:Depend on something... pay for admin

[mu51c10rd]

Google Postini is the service you need for message archiving. Looks a bit pricy as 1 year retention is 25 dollars per user, and up to 10 years is 45 dollars per user. If you want to host your email with Google, I would think Postini would be a necessity for legal discoveries.

Re:Depend on something... pay for admin

[ArundelCastle]

how do you get the data out of gmail to switch providers ?

IMAP or POP download. Which apparently wasn't affected.
I keep a local backup of my Gmail in Thunderbird. Try doing that with Hotmail.

Re:Depend on something... pay for admin

[Anonymous Coward]

They offer POP3 and IMAP both of which are standardized. If you really need to get your data a single user just needs to set up a mail client, a business might need to setup a script or write a program, but the is there and the only lock only needs a password to open it.

whoever modded you insightful was an idiot

Re:Depend on something... pay for admin

[JumpDrive]

ever serviced a discovery litigation from google ?
Have you?
Can you site multiple sources of discovery litigation? In companies with less than 100 employees ?

In a large number of companies it is cost prohibitive to employ someone to run nothing but email and pay for a lot of the bells and whistle's that you are talking about.

Re:Depend on something... pay for admin

[ryanvm]

Bullshit.

I have been the full time sysadmin responsible for the mail server. I have had the job of keeping the mail service up. It's not cheap. You need redundant networking, redundant servers, redundant storage, redundant staff, and the glue to make sure it all works. For anyone spending less than a couple hundred thousand a year on IT, it's damn near impossible to beat Google's uptime for hosted mail.

As for your other concern about getting the data out of Gmail - you use the same protocols the rest of the Internet uses - IMAP/POP and SMTP. Not rocket science.

Re:Depend on something... pay for admin

[BikeHelmet]

how do you get the data out of gmail to switch providers ?

I suggest POP or IMAP.

And coincidentally, if the IT guy at your company had set up your email client to sync with gmail, you'd still have access to all your emails while gmail is down - even if you can't send anything.

But for that, there's LAN-based IM clients. ;) You can also have a chat in-person.

Re:Depend on something... pay for admin

[Atario]

I've never really understood why so many Slashdotters have this attitude about hosted services. Perhaps they are local IT folks for smaller companies, and fear for their jobs?

It's the same reason Slashdot has:

• such a large component of libertarians
• every tech/science story hit with a slew of +5ed comments questioning the basic underlying premise of the research and/or machinery
• every story about a study tagged with "correlationisnotcausation"
• etc.

...and that reason is that code-hackers, having succeeded in something most people find impossible, go on to generalize that they must simply be hypercompetent, and therefore anything done by others must be questionable by comparison. Thus, hosted services, being run by mere mortals, can't be as good as something set up by one's own brilliant self.

Re:Depend on something... pay for admin

[drachenstern]

You don't really know much about email do you? I suggest you check on IMAP, perhaps POP, and maybe even read up on topics like downloading content from a server onto a client.

Really, you sound like a PHB...

Re:Depend on something... pay for admin

[joaobranco]

Umm, an hour of downtime doesn't mean your data is gone. I'll also echo earlier comments -- locally hosted email generally has more problems, as no company but the largest enterprise has the same magnitude of IT equipment and experience as Google.

I've never really understood why so many Slashdotters have this attitude about hosted services. Perhaps they are local IT folks for smaller companies, and fear for their jobs?

Could be in part that. Another explanation is that most that work as local IT folks (for any kind of business) know that when anything breaks, its always considered their fault (they are the people-facing shields, not the actual service providers elsewhere). And everything anything remote "breaks", or suffers any kind of troubles THEY will know it (because people will complain to them). Therefore, they both consider remote services less reliable than the average person (they know about more outages) as well as consider them less flexible (they can fix local problems, but are impotent to fix remote ones).

Re:Depend on something... pay for admin

[baKanale]

I've never really understood why so many Slashdotters have this attitude about hosted services. Perhaps they are local IT folks for smaller companies, and fear for their jobs?

I don't understand it either, even for smaller companies. I work for a small non-profit company and we use hosted services for our web hosting and our email system. They're great, mostly because if we ran these in-house we'd have to be on call 24/7 in case something went down afterhours, on weekend, or when we're on "vacation". We don't paid nearly enough for that, mostly because we don't have the money as an organization. But the off-site services work great (most of the time; our provider has a tendency to take down email for unscheduled maintenance without telling us), and are much cheaper than having to do support in-house.

Re:Depend on something... pay for admin

[internic]

I think it's just the psychological impact of the lack of control. It's the same reason that people fear flying more than driving (one of the reasons, anyway) or that it's much scarier when you're the passenger during a dangerous maneuver than if you are driving the car and doing the same thing yourself.

Re:Depend on something... pay for admin

[Anonymous Coward]

That is true for guarenteed uptime. However most smaller business's while they would love 24/7 guarenteed, they can usually settle with the single server that is backed up nightly and will "probably" run without fault for X years, if it dies they have a day without mail while someone rebuilds a server. Google doesn't really offer these people anything better.

Re:Depend on something... pay for admin

[selven]

such a large component of libertarians

Weird, I see a large component of libertarian haters who don't even understand what libertarianism is.

Re:Depend on something... pay for admin

[stephanruby]

ever serviced a discovery litigation from google ?
(you know where they judge you guilty of you dont come up with the data)

sorry but there is a good reason to keep this stuff on site and working...

Google Apps email allows you to keep all your inbound/outboung email archived, either through Postini or through your own in-house server (there are a dozen different ways to do this, there is no reason a company can't do this).

Re:Depend on something... pay for admin

[Daniel Boisvert]

Umm, an hour of downtime doesn't mean your data is gone. I'll also echo earlier comments -- locally hosted email generally has more problems, as no company but the largest enterprise has the same magnitude of IT equipment and experience as Google.

I've never really understood why so many Slashdotters have this attitude about hosted services. Perhaps they are local IT folks for smaller companies, and fear for their jobs?

It's more than that. There are more moving and breakable parts between you and a hosted provider than between you and an internal service, which changes the math a bit.

Some of the single points of failure are shared between both approaches too, so they're a wash for a small implementation. If you're a small company and your non-redundant core switch fails, your email is down either way, because you can't get to your email server or to your hosted provider, no matter how redundant your provider is. There are various components for which this is true, which helps to mitigate the benefit of a hosted service where your mail server is replaced by a massively redundant cluster.

You also have additional dependencies. If you're a small business with a single T1 to the internet, let's say, and the telecom bunker outside your building catches fire and you lose internet access, you've got problems. With a local email service, internal mail works, but you can't send email to or receive email from external users (let's pretend you don't have an offsite secondary MX or an outbound mail spool where this stuff queues, mostly invisibly to users). For organizations that are hugely dependent on internal email, that's quite a bit better than having no access to your (hosted) email at all.

Additionally, you get concerns about "If we outsource this today and we have problems in 2 years, will we still have somebody here who can design/build/find a better solution, or will it cost us a fortune in consultants if we let the in-house expertise lapse?".

You also have support issues. Google specifically is well-known for only doing things that can be automated (and doing them well, mind you). Support isn't always one of those things, and small companies are well-acquainted with getting the shaft from vendors because your business isn't worth enough for them to care (check out the quality differences between the enterprise and SMB versions of various products for examples). Given the importance of email to most organizations today, folks are a bit reluctant to hand it over to an outsider with minimal financial incentive to devote resources to their specific problems.

If you're a 5-person business, outsourcing email is likely a good idea, but once you start getting into the teens and twenties or so, it's probably worth a look at your particular circumstances before continuing that assumption.

Full disclosure: I'm currently a local IT guy for a smaller company, with enough on my to-do list that if I thought outsourcing email would work well for my users and save us time & money, I'd be all over it.

Re:Depend on something... pay for admin

[wytcld]

Hey, I'm responsible for mail servers. What's the fuss? Any reasonable competent *nix admin can keep a reasonably complex mail system running happily, along with many other systems. Assuming you've got other systems to manage, what's the point in not also running a couple of mail servers? You hardly need a FTE just to keep a mail system running for a few score, even a few hundred, people. Now, if you just can't get competent sysadmins, or your business is so unconnected from computers that all you really need is e-mail, so you've nothing else for sysadmins to do, go fly Google. Otherwise, what's to be gained? If you've already got sysadmins and they can't give you a reliable mail system putting in, at most, a couple of hundred man-hours per year (tops, most years < 100), fire 'em and hire better.

Re:Depend on something... pay for admin

[Chuck Chunder]

However 'small' that email server may be it'll still require some resources that could be better spent doing whatever it is that the business actually earns it's money from.

Why would you want to use your own resources or pay someone else to fix your server when you can simply get on with doing something else that's productive for your business for an hour or two and have Google fix it in the meantime?

Googles spam handling and not having to maintain your own server would make it a clear winner for most small businesses I'd expect. I'd think it's bigger business which are more likely to have their own economies of scale and internal intelligence that would be less obvious customers for Google.

Re:Depend on something... pay for admin

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually I have and my answer under oath: I searched all the databases looking for the terms and or persons involved and what I submitted earlier was all I found. The emails in question are older than six months, so no I don't have it. We purge our backups after six months.

And you know, not the judge, nor any of the litigators even blinked an eye about it.

I inhouse mail, and last I counted, we were at or a little over sixty-ish servers just for the mail, voice (tdm/pots), and storage servers to support groupware like instant messaging, video conferencing, call bridges for teleconferences, presence notifications, and PSTN, and hmm and... oh yeah, that wasn't cheap! Fax to email gateways and vice versa to work with a thousand or so Lexmarks spread across the continent.

If I got rid of mail, simply by pointing my mx records to google, I'd free up thirty-ish servers and a couple, three terabytes (or 15), and about $24,000 a year in power. The power bill alone would pay for 480 users. Not to mention all the other licenses involved, and there's truckloads more dollars there.

Now the thing is our phone system integrates via software agents with outlook. We've done AD schema changes and federation services (and don't look MS, but we used (free)radius all over the place to you know to fill in the gaps) so signing into pretty much anything inside or outside of the organization is exactly the same, your soft or hard or crackberry phone, is the same as your email, same as signing into your computer, same as signing into the wireless/wired lan (yeah 802.1x and sip hard phones on the same edge port and they _both_ authenticated and ran through NAC, how you like me now bitches!) same as your payroll portal, same as your inventory, same as your accounting, sames as well you get it.

I'm 100% sold on outsourcing email, but it's not just about email.

Some of the linux phone distros get it. They pile ignite (used to be wildfire), sugarcrm, a mail server, and oh yeah a phone system into a instant contact center. And it's a GREAT start. Maybe once FreeIPA gets a wee bit farther along, they'll bolt that in too and then, all of sudden we have something that doesn't require an oracle/java developer or a SQL/.Net developer to create all the glue that holds it altogether. Then maybe, we can just add mod_auth_kerberos to random vendor site and be done with it. Giving a shout out to sipXecs, making HA phone servers has never been easier, you guys ROCK! It's the pits about your parent company, hope you all live to see another day! .... and oh yeah, we won the case :D

Regards,

Duane S ... uhm no

Re:Depend on something... pay for admin

[beefnog]

As for getting data out of gmail, the concern with a discovery case is rarely as simple as getting email from the user's mailbox. Usually you have to recover it from backups. How long do you know (not think or conjecture) that Google keeps deleted emails around?

Re:Depend on something... pay for admin

[Anonymous Coward]

I think Gmail is a great service for personal accounts...

but for business sorry you need to pay a real live person or support company who will actually be able to deal with your data

how do you get the data out of gmail to switch providers ?

ever serviced a discovery litigation from google ?
(you know where they judge you guilty of you dont come up with the data)

sorry but there is a good reason to keep this stuff on site and working...

regards

John Jones

if only google owned a firm that specialized in legal discovery like postini :-p hold your breath!

Re:Depend on something... pay for admin

[moosesocks]

• such a large component of libertarians
• every tech/science story hit with a slew of +5ed comments questioning the basic underlying premise of the research and/or machinery
• every story about a study tagged with "correlationisnotcausation"
• etc.

Well, the second two are hallmarks of being a good scientist (the first one, not so much, given where The Money comes from, and the fact that private industry has a long track record of being poor scientific citizens)

I certainly don't doubt that many slashdotters overestimate their own intelligence and competencies, and often make sweeping claims outside the areas of their expertise. However, intense skepticism is necessary for the scientific process to work. A good scientist checks his work again, and again, and again â" and then designs another experiment to test the same theory.

Many important scientific discoveries have been made because "something about the results wasn't quite right."

Re:Depend on something... pay for admin

[slimjim8094]

Now that's being a little harsh. I think it has more to do with the fact that if I install a Postfix server for 500 people, I can set it up and ensure that it will be bulletproof. It also means that I can get right in the guts - perhaps somebody can't log in, well does the server see their attempt or not? I'm the one in control of updates, so it doesn't just change on me. And if it breaks catastrophically, I know how to deal with it - restore from backups and the like.

That's' why I wouldn't choose a hosted system without a very good reason. It's not that they're not as good, it's that they necessarily can't fit my needs like a glove because they're a mitten.

And I don't think anybody is seriously criticizing the research (without reason). It's usually in reaction to the summary which, shall we say, doesn't always reflect the research. Although some nerds have intimate knowledge of the subject, and most others have the critical thinking to say 'wait, but spinning in all directions isn't zero-g'.

I think you're being a little unfair. I would caution you against thinking that you understand all of us nerds and are yourself 'hypercompetent'.

Re:Depend on something... pay for admin

[Glendale2x]

No archiving is ever too expensive to avoid getting your ass handed to you by lawyers.

Re:Depend on something... pay for admin

[multipartmixed]

> Full disclosure: I'm currently a local IT guy for a smaller
> company, with enough on my to-do list that if I thought outsourcing
> email would work well for my users and save us time & money, I'd be
> all over it.

It's worked well for me so far -- half the company had been forwarding all mail to gmail anyhow, because it's search engine for multi-gigabyte mail spools is very, very hard to implement locally.

Re:Depend on something... pay for admin

[Ma8thew]

Well, the second two are hallmarks of being a good scientist

No, good scientists actually read research rather than basing their opinion of it on a paragraph summary written by an only partially competent Slashdot editor. And they accept that they probably shouldn't comment on research outside their area of expertise.

And rather than screaming 'correlation is not causation' they have an actual understanding of statistics, and appreciate that there is more to it than a one liner. And they realise that the people that did the research are quite clever, so they probably did some tests on their results to check that they are valid.

Re:Depend on something... pay for admin

[Anonymous Coward]

> ever serviced a discovery litigation from google ?

Anonymous, I'm afraid. But the answer is: yes. Yes I have. I downloaded all relevant emails via POP3, exported the resulting mailbox. What was the problem went to be?

Re:Depend on something... pay for admin

[xkcdFan1011011101111]

I wish your post could have been modded +infinity.

Re:Depend on something... pay for admin

[acoustix]

I can honestly say that I spend less than $100,000 on my Exchange setup and have better uptime than gmail. ~200 users and 5 9's of uptime a year. Damn near impossible? Not really. Maybe for the incompetent, but not for a decent admin.

Re:Depend on something... pay for admin

[ImprovOmega]

It strikes me that GMail's for-pay services are targeted more at medium businesses. That indefinite in-between area where you're big enough to *really* need good uptime on your e-mail system, but too small to have a first class datacenter with 24/7 IT support staff. Basically companies with around 500 to a few thousandish employees. Much smaller and yeah, one server, one day downtime is tolerable, yadda yadda. Much bigger and you have the resources to devote to getting that kind of uptime for yourself. In the middle though, outsourcing is more cost efficient.

Re:Depend on something... pay for admin

[RedBear]

Or maybe that old saying about not putting all of one's eggs in one basket actually had a point. Maybe the laws of the universe we are currently inhabiting declare that if an entire country grows crops of the exact same strain of potatoes, a blight could come along and wipe out all those crops at the same time, causing a million people to starve to death. This is one of the basic mathematical laws of the universe. Diversity and decentralization equals greater safety for the system as a whole. The "system" can be any set of things that are interconnected, whether it's people, plants, animals, cities, or an entire planet's ecosystem.

Mass hosted solutions like Gmail will never be as safe as local solutions for the simple fact that they are essentially monolithic organisms. They may be more reliable in terms of total up-time versus a local solution, but having an entire country, or an entire planet of businesses and individuals relying on a single solution that could EVER fail for ANY amount of time is idiotic, because eventually it will fail. No matter how robust their backups and redundancy strategies are, they are still consolidating the failure points from a million different individual failure points that can only take down a local system to a few failure points which can each take down a huge swath of subsystems.

Worse still, the software behind it all is the same, so the system as a whole becomes the equivalent of an entire country growing the same crop strain, despite any redundancies built into the network. One major problem in the software can take down every node in the system, creating a universal failure. This doesn't need to be proven, it just happened! The fact that this specific failure only lasted an hour or two is irrelevant and ignores the big picture. The failure itself proves that the entire system is vulnerable. It may be safe for a subset of the population to rely on such a solution, but it is very unsafe for the entire population to blithely ignore such problems and continue jumping on the bandwagon. The higher the percentage of people who are using a hosted solution, the worse it will be when the cloud eventually goes down.

In case my point isn't clear enough, what I'm trying to point out is that it is not dangerous for an individual business to rely on cloud-hosted solutions. What is dangerous is the attitude that it will be fine if ALL businesses rely on the same cloud-hosted service. That is the attitude that seems to be promoted here by everyone who doesn't think a Gmail outage is a big deal, just because it isn't a (relatively) big deal for their own company versus a local solution that used to cost a lot more.

BTW, Your comments and assumptions about the Slashdot audience make you just as idiotic if not more so than the folks you are trying to belittle. While there are people on every forum on the web who seem to think they know everything, I don't believe that is the root of most of the comments here, or anywhere else for that matter. In this particular instance there are very valid reasons that I've just explained for continuing to distrust hosted services for now and far into the future. Until someone creates a set of hosted services that operate just like a natural ecological system, with various different population strains of software widely scattered through the physical world, doing the same jobs but each local variant uniquely resistant to different attacks or configuration problems because of their differences, and each segment able to effect repairs on itself, there will never be a reason for the entire world as a whole to collectively put complete trust in hosted solutions.

Oddly enough, we have a situation right now which closely matches what I've just described. It's called "local hosting". Each node is largely unique (except for the large monoculture of Microsoft-based software, which often causes problems where multiple nodes can infect each other). Local nodes can fail and then repair themselves without really affecting other nodes. Strange how well this works. Now all we need to do is keep improving quality and interoperability of the individual strains of software that runs on each local node, while continuing to maintain the separation of nodes...

Re:Depend on something... pay for admin

[RedBear]

I think it's just the psychological impact of the lack of control. It's the same reason that people fear flying more than driving (one of the reasons, anyway) or that it's much scarier when you're the passenger during a dangerous maneuver than if you are driving the car and doing the same thing yourself.

Really? The lack of control? If I had successfully transported 300,000 people per flight every day for a year without an accident, using a new fleet of super-giant airplanes, and then I built an airplane even bigger that could hold 2,000,000 people, would you take a flight on that new super-super-giant airplane? Or would you stand back and tell everyone getting on that plane that they are morons while you go get on a smaller plane?

It's not any scarier dying on a plane than it is dying in a car, at least for the individual The difference is how many other people are dying simultaneously, all of whom were relying on the pilot not to be flying drunk, or relying on a small team of maintenance guys to put back all the nuts they took off the engine during the last tune-up. Lack of control actually ends up getting people dead or injured in many situations in the real world.

These cloud services are developed and run by human beings, and human beings make mistakes. That in itself is a perfectly valid reason to be uncomfortable with hosted services.

Re:Depend on something... pay for admin

[internic]

If I had successfully transported 300,000 people per flight every day for a year without an accident, using a new fleet of super-giant airplanes, and then I built an airplane even bigger that could hold 2,000,000 people, would you take a flight on that new super-super-giant airplane? Or would you stand back and tell everyone getting on that plane that they are morons while you go get on a smaller plane?

A very flawed analogy. Obviously, materials science dictates practical upper limits to the size of planes (until we can build nanotube planes or something). But more importantly, gmail is not some hypothetical service. It has been running for quite a while now, so there is data from which to estimate reliability. It's not the sort of speculative choice you suggest.

...the difference is how many other people are dying simultaneously, all of whom were relying on the pilot not to be flying drunk, or relying on a small team of maintenance guys to put back all the nuts they took off the engine during the last tune-up. Lack of control actually ends up getting people dead or injured in many situations in the real world.

This sort of reasoning is precisely the problem. It's not that the risks are not real, it's that people cannot estimate their magnitude well at all. Yes, the pilot could be drunk or the maintenance guys could screw up, but statistically it's way less likely to get you killed than driving from here to there. The problem is essentially the people far overestimate the safety of their driving and their car. The truth is that your car can have mechanical problems (because your mechanic screwed up or because you simply haven't been getting the necessary maintenance) or you can make mistakes, as can those on the road around you (not to mention being impaired by alcohol). People irrationally overestimate the safety when they have some measure of control. The only rational approach is to look at the data, in this case the statistics.

These cloud services are developed and run by human beings, and human beings make mistakes.

I think you'll find that most solutions have this problem (except perhaps those offered by Cyberdyne Systems). I'm not an IT professional, so I don't claim to be sure what sort of solution is better, but any rational argument about it must stem from statistics. Most of the arguments I've seen offered against hosted email solutions (on reliability, not privacy or other issues like that) don't proceed from the data but rather from irrational arguments like those offered above, i.e. "if I'm in control it's obviously safer".

As a non-professional, my suspicion is that hosted email services will generally end up being superior, basically due to economies of scale: When a company does things on a large enough scale they can afford to hire people who are really good specifically at those skills, they can choose whatever hardware is most appropriate (i.e., if the most effective solution is a $500k machine that's okay as long as it services enough people), and they are in a position to more reasonably implement things like redundancy, off-site backups, etc.

The main rational counter-argument I can see (other than simply data on reliability or per-user cost) is basically that there's always a trade-off of cost vs. reliability and it may be that you're in a position where email reliability is worth much more to you than the average gmail user. In that case, the choices gmail makes may not be the right trade-off for you. I suspect, however, that gmail's reliability is high enough that almost no one is willing to spend enough to significantly beat it, so this is probably a non-issue.

Re:Depend on something... pay for admin

[RedBear]

You completely and utterly missed the point that it doesn't matter how safe the super-super-giant airplane is compared to a car with two people inside. The super-super-giant airplanes might run safely for a hundred years, but when one finally goes down you lose 2,000,000 people simultaneously. Or, in the context of Google services, when 2,000,000 businesses around the world are relying on Google services and those services suddenly go down and stay down for a week, the business world is going to have a serious problem.

When dealing with this sort of globally scaled service used by millions of organizations, the risks no longer end at the front door of your local business. So, statistically, the service would need to be overall 100% reliable in the long term. Which, according to the laws of this universe, is a practical impossibility. It's OK if one of my suppliers is having a problem, but if ALL of my suppliers and my own business have a problem at the same time then it is very difficult to get business done.

With cloud services the size of Gmail, the risk evaluation MUST include the big picture of what percentage of the business world is all using the same service. To leave the assessment as just a per-business exercise is not wise. Local statistics can and will be meaningless as a way of determining total risk of going with cloud-based services. As the services get larger, this will be more and more true every day. It really doesn't matter how reliable the cloud-based services are, statistically. Get a high enough percentage of society on the cloud and all someone needs to do is nuke a few data centers to take down an entire country, a la "Fight Club".

That was my point. The big picture of the system as a whole actually matters with consolidated online services. Hope you didn't miss it this time.

Eating their own dog food

[Max Romantschuk]

It it's true that this outage is affecting Google too I have to say that is a good thing. Eating your own dog food, product-wise, is always a good idea.

Re:Eating their own dog food

[blamanj]

It's a good idea as long as your allowed to do something about it. At some companies, you just use it and suffer. From what I've seen, the culture at Google allows people to make contributions (e.g., Labs) to fix things.

Re:Eating their own dog food

[Scott Kevill]

At least it makes sense for the Labs to eat their own dog food.

Indeed..

[Anonymous Coward]

I guess it's hard to complain as I use google apps for free.. Though years back I made the switch over from my own personal mail system to escape the infrequent, but intolerable outages from my ISP..

OHh well, I guess carrier pidgeon is still an option.

Bah, gmail is great, if this is it for awhile, I won't complain.

Working For Me Now

[Anonymous Coward]

It started working again for me at about 5:15pm EDT.

eating your own dogfood

[Trepidity]

Upside: shows confidence in your products; makes it more likely that your engineers will spot problems if they use the software and services themselves; can increase how motivated people are to improve the products

Downside: tainted dogfood kills the engineers who would have investigated the issue

Re:eating your own dogfood

[Chyeld]

Solution: Hire food tasters, engineers should only be fed a set number of days after if the tasters aren't dead. Also resolves the issue of engineers complaining about being fed dog food.

Re:eating your own dogfood

[dkleinsc]

Solution: Make the beancounters eat the dogfood, not the engineers. Sure, you'll lose a few, but that's just solving another problem. Any BOFH would know that.

Re:eating your own dogfood

[justleavealonemmmkay]

Working for a mobile phone company.

I believe our operations engineers all have spare sim cards, not of the competition, but of foreign operators.

Eh

[copponex]

I've had more outages through power loss and the connection being physically severed to locations than I have through gmail, but I do live in the south and everything is above ground around here.

Unacceptable!

[Anonymous Coward]

This is what happens when you force a product out of beta too early. Google should have kept Gmail in beta for a few more years.

Cloud to Cloud Fail?

[Halotron1]

The RSS feed shows they've been having problems since yesterday.
I got a 502 error today, not a huge deal for me, I just use it for personal but if I was paying for it I'd be mad, just like people at work get mad at IT when the Exchange server goes down.

Anybody know what kind of hardware setup they have there?

Maybe they contracted a third party company to store the data in the cloud and their service was interrupted?!

Re:Cloud to Cloud Fail?

[drachenstern]

Seriously? You think Google (who invented their own filesystem format, who are reportedly the third largest computer manufacturer in the world) outsourced their data storage to someone else?

Are we thinking of the same company?

Re:Cloud to Cloud Fail?

[Halotron1]

No, not serious.
I was trying to be snarky and apparently failed.

Me too

[Anonymous Coward]

Google apps for domains, free version. 20 employees have been using it all evening with no issues (Belgium).

my domain via gmail

[The Yuckinator]

I drank the Google kool-aid about six months ago and moved my personal domain's mail over to the free gmail service. I've been extremely happy with it ever since.

I think it's interesting that I couldn't access my personal domain gmail during this outage, but my @gmail.com account worked without issue.

But what will happen to all my spam?

[blg42]

I use my gmail account whenever I sign up for free services. This is serious people! Where will all my spam go? Oh, wait, nevermind...

Android not affected

[trapnest]

My Android device was not affected by this outage at all.

Google outage error

[owlstead]

Still displayed on my screen, as I am watching Tomb Raider on BBC1, so I haven't hit refresh yet. The source does not have any comments either.

Google
Error

        Server Error
        The server encountered a temporary error and could not complete your request.

        Please try again in 30 seconds.

Didn't see that...

[rickb928]

I've been using GMail without error from about 0800 - 1500MST.

What outage again? Didn't see it. Must not be as widespread as reported...

BREAKING: Snowstorm Proves Global Warming a Myth!

[weston]

So much for handing your email over to Google because it's more reliable than hosting locally...

Yeah. As my subject heading says...

Seriously, though: it probably depends on who's doing the hosting. I'm sure there's slashdot readers for whom setting up (and maintaining) their own mail server is a short task done before breakfast without breaking a mental sweat. I'm further sure I could learn to be one of those people, but I'm betting the time I'd invest in doing that is less than the amount I've time I've spent waiting for google to come up.

Not just gmail, Dell too

[schwit1]

We are experiencing 503 errors and timeouts from Dell websites.

Cloud Computing

[Macrat]

Welcome to the promise of Cloud Computing.

The future is here.

Re:Cloud Computing

[Shados]

Of course, that would only assume that you have the ressources within your walls to keep a 5 nine uptime on all your application.

Its not like local outages never happen...and it can take more than a few hours to fix severe ones for shops of a few hundred employees and a handful of IT guys.

Re:Cloud Computing

[Fastolfe]

This is exactly why local e-mail hosting is probably one of the worst ideas to come about. There was a distinct reason that computing moved from a locally-supported model to a centralized one. Imagine being in the position that you were depending upon your local mail server for your small to medium sized business and you can no longer take orders and communicate with vendors and customers. I could imagine the loss would be quite heavy and the impact felt. This is why it is always better to do a thorough cost-benefit analysis, estimate likely downtime in either scenario, and outsource when it makes sense to do so.

Re:Cloud Computing

[petrus4]

This is exactly why local e-mail hosting is probably one of the worst ideas to come about.

I truly hate it when someone engages in this form of mimicry; copying an original poster's format almost exactly, but then using it to refute them. It has the fingerprints of an FSF troll pretty much all over it, as well; it's a tactic I've seen them use, and Debian fanboys as well.

The single worst part about it, though, is that the poor soul who does it, generally seems to be under the delusion that it makes them look intelligent.

Re:Cloud Computing

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

Welcome to the promise of Cloud Computing.

The future is here.

Yeah because email server reliability was never in doubt before the cloud.

Re:Cloud Computing

[Macrat]

And when it is also your calendar? contacts? documents? Not just e-mail.

Do you really want all your eggs in one basket?

Re:Cloud Computing

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

And when it is also your calendar? contacts? documents? Not just e-mail.

Do you really want all your eggs in one basket?

Unlike everybody using Exchange or even just having a common server?

Your eggs are already in that basket. The difference is Google has the hardware, software, and man-power to maintain it.

Cloud computing's not right for everything, but you've picked a piss-poor example to make your point.

problem resolved...

[Anonymous Coward]

4:37 PM
The problem with Google Mail should be resolved. We apologize for the inconvenience and thank you for your patience and continued support.

My outage has been longer

[Duxkhead]

I've not received any emails via my gmail address since yesterday. I do, however, get emails that gmail fetches from my POP3 and IMAP accounts. According to my exim logs, gmail accepts the mail, it's getting lost internally. I'm now getting mail delivery delay notifications from 10.90.242.1 somewhere inside Google.

At the same time the delivery issues started, gmail started complaining that it wasn't able to load my contacts list either. But my contacts list on Google Voice appear to be just peachy, and I thought they were the same list.

Eh, who knows, I just hope they get it fixed. I'm not going to complain about something I get for free.

Re:My outage has been longer

[drachenstern]

You should, if it continues after this. Because if you don't, how will they know it's broken? Guessing?

I may make jokes with my friends about google being omniscient, but really...

Full Disclosure: I wouldn't toss my hand up right away for a free service either...

Re:My outage has been longer

[Duxkhead]

Hey, I took the middle ground and reported it without complaining early Tuesday morning. I certainly don't think Google is omniscient. Although, I'd certainly know if my email server at work was sending out piles of notifications. Then again, if they're alerted of issues via email, you've got a pretty little chicken and egg issue. I'm sure they're smarter than that though.

Read it and It happens

[PPNSteve]

For what its worth, I wasn't having any access issues all morning on Gmail.. this is, not until I read about the outage and went to check (NOT EVEN 5 MINS SINCE THE LAST TIME I CHECKED MY MAIL!) and lo and behold, it was down.. not responding.. telling me "can't connect to Gmail and to check my connection"

BTW, It is fixed and back up here for me now.. outage lasted approx 45 mins out west where I am.

failwhale? Well, u fail

[drachenstern]

No, twitter's always down...

They even made it part of the SLA, and a ritual of passage.

Hell, it has its own meme

Re:failwhale? Well, u fail

[bill_mcgonigle]

Hell, it has its own meme

I upgraded to Firefox 3 just at the right time for the AwesomeBar to learn Twitter's title as "Twitter - Over Capacity". It's lovely that it's still omnipresent today.

Re:failwhale? Well, u fail

[drachenstern]

HAHAHAHAH, I lol'd.

Thank you.

Way OT - Did you see the recent article about people not wanting to upgrade because of the awesome bar? IE8 does the same thing. But the private browsing feature of each is NICE. ;)

ironically enough...

[Simulant]

... I submitted to Ask Slashdot about Google Enterprise Support earlier today. Guess that won't get posted.

I expect and can live with occasional outages but when mail disappears as has happened with a paying, Google Apps customer of mine it is another matter.

Google tech support has been slow and woefully inadequate in helping to resolve the issue or even determine what happened. Also, while the assumption has always been "backups are not necessary with gmail" I can't get a straight answer from Google about the possibility of restore without Postini services in the case of malicious data deletion as appears to be the case in this instance. It's hard to say because Google still hasn't given me basic information about the missing data. They were able to tell me that it was all deleted at once by some one who legitimately logged in but the won't tell me when.

Anyone else have encounters with Google support over missing mail?

Re:ironically enough...

[Insaniac99]

... while the assumption has always been "backups are not necessary with gmail" ...

I really want to know who started that stupid idea. You always want multiple off-site backups of anything important, cloud resources such as gmail and google docs count as one of those sources, you still want others. You also want local copies of any data that you absolutely have to have, what if your local ISP is having troubles and you need to access important documents?

There are a hundred things that could go wrong with using any off-site service as your one and only solution from simple outages and lost passwords to having all your eggs in one basket if someone hacks in or uses elevated privileges to do malicious deeds. The idea that any cloud based resource or offsite backup solution is the be-all, end-all solution for secure data storage is stupid and extremely lazy.

Re:ironically enough...

[Simulant]

  I agree... (and I argued against going with google apps for this reason) but people seem to think it's 'magic' and their data is safe. Google doesn't really offer backup services for small business and they don't seem to want to answer questions about it.
  You can get Postini but Google doesn't encourage it for under 100 users. (it overkill for small business) There are utilities out there for users to individually backup mail but they are a) slow (backup via pop or imap) and b) are not easily managed or scheduled.

In any case, I never expected Google to restore the mail, just to help me figure out what happened to it.

1.2 hours?

[winomonkey]

"It states a resolution is expected within the next 1.2 hours ..." Why the surprise at this? All estimates include their Google 20% one way or another, right?

to all the admins out there

[nimbius]

along with me who are sick of hearing, "we should switch to google" or "google gives me a trillion gigs of storage for mail why dont you?!" this outage proves a point: all services fail from time to time. the difference is when mine fails you can call me and ask WTF? When googles service fails you still have to pay me for network operations, but you also have to pay google for the privilege of asking "so whats wrong?"

and despite your hardest whining or assertiveness, you may never get an answer.

Re:to all the admins out there

[DaMattster]

I noticed that the last few days google seemed to be having stability problems. Using gmail myself, I've seen it. After this incident, it is time to upgrade my broadband to a static IP and take care of email for myslef.

No you don't.

[raehl]

but you also have to pay google for the privilege of asking "so whats wrong?

Or, you could NOT pay Google at all, and when something goes wrong, realize that being able to call and ask what is going wrong is not going to get it fixed any sooner, and wait until they fix it.

Having someone soothe you over the phone during the process is a waste of money.

Serious Outage?

[427_ci_505]

Why so serious?

America

[dandart]

So does all this stuff only happen in America? Because if you hadn't have mentioned it, I wouldn't have known it was going on.

I'm a Brit, by the way, pip pip.

It always happens this way...

[Srsen]

No sooner do you come out of beta than ....

Re:BREAKING: Snowstorm Proves Global Warming a Myt

[ajs]

I'm sure there's slashdot readers for whom setting up (and maintaining) their own mail server is a short task done before breakfast without breaking a mental sweat.

Not really. The problem is that, as with most hard tasks, it's easy to trivialize in the abstract. In 10 seconds, I can type a command-line script that will answer port 25. In a slightly longer time I can pull down the appropriate packages for the Linux distro of choice and configure them with whatever domain name. In slightly longer, I can configure appropriate countermeasures and firewalling. Given budget and time, I can deploy a suite of additional features including redundancy (local and/or remote), various protocols for access to the mail, a Web front-end, calendaring, mailing list handling, archival, SOx-compliant retention management, monitoring, escalation paths, and so on...

Or I can sign up for Google Apps and have all of the above deployed in under a half hour for a company of nearly arbitrary size with customizations (logo, URLs for local support, internal documentation updates, etc.) being done within a week and larger-scale work (changing deployment manifests for new systems to ensure compatible browsers and pre-configured IMAP clients, etc.) being done over the course of the next month or two in conjunction with other parts of the organization.

After running my own mail servers for a decade, I finally gave in and went the Google route for my personal domain, and I'd recommend it for any size organization. There are pitfalls. You'll have to adapt or replace pieces of what Google gives you (their mailing list management is atrocious). But I feel that the work they leave in your lap is a very small trade-off given what you get.

Internediate measures.

[Quasimodem]

Do you at least have an upskirt photo of your foul-mouthed girlfriend to tide us over until Fyzzler's gmail account is working?

Cloud Computing

[DaMattster]

This is exactly why cloud computing is probably one of the worst ideas to come about. There was a distinct reason that computing moved from a centralised model to a descentralised one. Imagine being in the position that you were depending upon Google Apps for your small to medium sized business and you can no longer take orders and communicate with vendors and customers. I could imagine the loss would be quite heavy and the impact felt. This is why it is always better to retain control over your computing. It is destiny best left in YOUR hands.

wat

[nilbog]

Difficult to coordinate? Are you telling me the engineers there use the system they're supposed to be running as their sole means of communication?

Egads man.

What's a good backup program for Gmail?

[nbauman]

What's a good Windows backup program that I can use to download all my Gmail messages to Thunderbird?

Re:What's a good backup program for Gmail?

[Austin Schuh]

Use the IMAP feature on Thunderbird to download them locally.

Re:What's a good backup program for Gmail?

[multipartmixed]

Wayyyy too obvious.

You should have told him to download them all with Outlook Express, then get Thunderbird to import them.

Re:What's a good backup program for Gmail?

[KingAlanI]

I admit I'm not fancy, I just copy/forward the relatively important messages to other mailservers.

iGoogle

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't know for everyone, but I had GMail outage for a few hours, both HTTP and HTTPS, yet my iGoogle GMail app worked the whole time.

Seems like the outage was very specific.

Yes, the cloud sucks...

[petrus4]

...and as someone else wrote, we're now seeing the reason why.

Cloud computing is exactly the kind of buzzword-laden, idiotic fad that tends to be loved both by corporate marketing droids and technophobic Baby Boomers, both of whom have roughly equivalent levels of intelligence.

All it is going to take is a single major, successful DDoS attack against Google or some other cloud provider, and the cloud will go to the memetic rubbish bin where it belongs.

If you're one of the intellectual cripples who has difficulty understanding why cloud computing is a bad idea, ask yourself the question of whether or not you're going to be able to access your email if Google goes down, or if web access outside your ISP's own subnet does.

Yes, I have a Gmail account, but it is a convenience linked to my WoW blog, and a spam trap at best. It isn't something which I rely on for anything truly important, because I'm old enough to remember decentralised email, and to have more fucking sense.

Darn fool kids; they never learn. We keep seeing the same old mistakes being made, over and over and over again. I'm reminded of the old Frantics song, here.

Dumb terminal/"cloud" computing? Boot to the head. Creating a single, centralised point of failure which is just waiting for a DDoS attack. Genius.

XML/binary format RPC in GUIs? Boot to the head. Opaque, undiscoverable, uneditable, and totally unnecessary, except in the minds of marketing suits, or post-pubescent CS grads who've been fed corporate Kool-Aid. Use sockets, morons.

Binary subpackaging of libraries? Boot to the head. Given what bandwidth and disk space is at these days, any claim that it saves space is totally bogus, and the only thing it does do is add needless complexity, and reduce reliability. Put the whole thing in a single package, and stop thinking you're smart for doing otherwise. You're not.

Writing opaque package management in C, with a dep list a mile long, when a system written in shell, awk, and using the graph/dep management ability of Make itself would work probably more effectively? Boot to the head. Although sorry; I keep forgetting that Awk isn't considered a "real," programming language. You might want to let the guys using it for AI research know that, though; they could forget otherwise.

Being a snot nosed, latte sipping, yuppie CS graduate who thinks they know how to code, and then spawning attrocities like Dbus? Boot to the head. The kernel hardware notification system and udev work perfectly well by themselves. Adding more daemons when you don't need to simply adds unnecessary complexity, which again potentially reduces robustness.

Writing opaque, non-standard, dynamic GUI "automounter" garbage for Crapbuntu instead of teaching users how to edit /etc/fstab? Boot to the head. Use things which are easily locatable, and written in text which can likewise be edited easily. Then again, I guess I can't expect the Stallmanite 14 year olds who code Linux's userland these days to know about real UNIX philosophy, now can I?

Causing GRUB to default to "quiet splash," in Crapbuntu so that when the boot process inevitably fails due to the distro coming with Bit Torrent servers by default, the user can't see the daemon that is causing the boot process to fail, and are thus left with a totally opaque, unfixable black screen that they can't recover from? Boot to the fucking head, x100.

Re:Yes, the cloud sucks...

[Anonymous Coward]

Yawn...go back to your cave, you Unix cave dweller. This is the modern world, your day has come...and gone.
Don't wanna go back? Then join the hipsters or get a boot to the head.

Re:Yes, the cloud sucks...

[Anonymous Coward]

internet tough guy alert.

Seriously man, I understand the venom is a writing style issue, but tone it down... Not to mention that everything starting from "XML/binary format RPC in GUIs" was pretty much a waste of everyones time -- they _may_ be examples of bad design, but how does that improve this discussion?

Bar code dialect

[AlpineR]

Plural second person future perfect:

all'ya'll'll've

Usage:

All'ya'll'll've been doin' it wrong if all'ya'll do what yer plannin' on doin'.

Re:Bar code dialect

[mother_reincarnated]

Nice try but that would be fixin' not plannin'...

Re:Bar code dialect

[drachenstern]

Actually, "plannin' on doin'" is perfectly acceptable round these parts, or alternately it should be
"fixin' to do"

To the PP, I see you've lived round here too...

Don't forget "yall's"...

[javabandit]

The possessive form of "yall" is "yall's". Here is an example sentence.

"I saw the car outside and figured it was yall's."

"Yall's" is a contraction of Yours (all of yours).

In the northeast, a variation is "youze guys'es". In the deep south, another variation is "your'n".

Gotta love English.

Shades of AT&T, January 15, 1990

[Fencepost]

Most of the long distance in the country dropped that day, triggered by 4ESS switches hitting a bug, detecting, it, going offline (with load shifted to other switches). Increased load made the bug in question more likely to be hit, so those switches would in turn drop and shift load away (sometimes back to the originator). 9 hours of basically no long-distance service.

And just think, it was a year and a half before Berners-Lee announced the "World Wide Web" and Linus announced that he was working on this "Linux" thing.

IMAP is god send!

[motang]

Even though it was done, I was able to send and receive email via Thunderbird with IMAP.

GMail the mail service verse web service

[sl149q]

The GMail Mail Service did not appear to have any problems today at all... You could IMAP or POP your mail all the while... and use SMTP to send..

What was down was the GMail Web Service. For reading your email online... it of course is just another client of the GMail Mail Service.

Question

[Anonymous Coward]

When Google mail goes down, how do they tell each other at Google?

GMail is experiencing a major outage

[ChoboMog]

That's why its still it beta... oh wait >_

Misplaced apostrophe

[The Monster]

ya'll'll ...PS, it just means "you all will"

If it does, then let's contract it:

"you all will"
"y'all'll"

The apostrophes indicate the missing letters "ou" and "wi".

As much of a prescriptivist grammarian as I am, I recognize that English lost something when singular "thou" was merged into the plural "you" into a numberless second person. Meanwhile, German got to keep "du" for singular. Words like "y'all" and "youse" are simply attempts to re-establish number in the second person. I prefer the former, but that may be my Midwestern bias showing through. I do like the apostrophe to be put in the right place, though.

Or dost thou shit me with thy comment?

Re:Misplaced apostrophe

[drachenstern]

"right place" is a matter of perspective, as always. We speak with a drawl, so we make our words reflect the drawl. I've seen it done both ways all my life, and I'm not going to give up on my preferred version based on pronunciation. It's not like we spell any other words correctly. ;)

However, I agree with you in the rest of the post, especially in regards to second person plural.

We'll just have to disagree on where the apostrophe goes in ya'll. At least we're not saying [yuze].

Re:Misplaced apostrophe

[The Monster]

and I'm not going to give up on my preferred version based on pronunciation

There is no pronunciation of the apostrophe. It merely indicates the missing letters. The remaining letters are "yall" either way.

That a lot of other people misplace apostrophes (or should I say "apostrophe's"?) doesn't mean you should do it too. Y'a'l'l are just wrong.

Re:Misplaced apostrophe

[PainKilleR-CE]

I think he means that "you" would be written "ya", in which case there are no letters missing from the first word in the contraction.

Re:Misplaced apostrophe

[The Monster]

I think he means that "you" would be written "ya", in which case there are no letters missing from the first word in the contraction.

If there are no missing letters, there should therefore be no apostrophe at all.

FAIL.

Re:Misplaced apostrophe

[PainKilleR-CE]

There would be an a missing from "all" if you were spelled "ya". Thanks for playing, though.

Re:Misplaced apostrophe

[ivucica]

"ya'll'll" should then mean "you will all", right? He got it almost right :-)

Re:Misplaced apostrophe

[treeves]

I don't believe it was singular thou and plural you. It was formal you and familiar thou, like Japanese has. I base on that on my recollection from reading a book about the history of the English language. Either way, it was a loss.
Another interesting tidbit I got from that book: "Ye Olde Shoppe" is pronounced basically the same as "The Old Shop". The first letter is not a "y" but a letter that looks like a "y" called a thatch, IIRC, that is pronounced as "th".

Re:Misplaced apostrophe

[mattmatt]

Thorn. Try pressing [Compose] [t] [h] (or I believe [Alt]+0222 on Windows).

I /believe/ this was gradually replaced with the Wynn (which looks a bit similar to the thorn) and eventually with the Y (which looks a bit similar to the Wynn).

Re:Misplaced apostrophe

[The Monster]

I don't believe it was singular thou and plural you. It was formal you and familiar thou, like Japanese has. I base on that on my recollection from reading a book about the history of the English language.

Thy (recollection of the) book is incomplete.

Originally, it was singular thou and plural you, but the influence of Norman French royalty and nobility caused the plural form to take on an additional flavor of formality (think of the "royal 'we'" here). At this point, "thou" was only used for familiar singular, while "you" could be used to indicate formal and/or plural. Eventually, "thou" was not used anywhere other than the Bible and certain religious/ethnic groups, which has led more modern speakers of English to think thou is the formal version!

Re:Misplaced apostrophe

[treeves]

Thanks for the correction and elaboration.

IMAP was still working when I noticed it go down.

[heretoo]

IMAP was still working when I noticed it go down.

igoogle is a Godsend!

[wolverine1999]

I just logged on igoogle, read my gmail without a problem...

Gears and you're done.

[djMouton]

This episode made me really glad I use Google Gears. Yes, it makes my Google Apps experience noticeably more wonky, but I've taken to using Safari as my day-to-day Gmail/Docs/Calendar app, firing it up in Firefox + Gears every week or so to keep the offline backup synced. To each his own, but as a guy who just wants a mindless backup solution and doesn't mind having copies of his life floating around Mountain View, I can't recommend Gears highly enough. YMMV.

Re:Gears and you're done.

[Anonymous Coward]

I have google gears installed, and i have offline Gmail setup, if this is what you're referring to, but there's still a problem with that. Using my "offline Gmail" loaded up the 502 just the same as for everyone else. Perhaps i should have disconnected from my network, but because there was a page there, my offline gmail didn't kick in. In my opinion, if offline gmail doesn't work because there is a page actually loading, (the 502 page) then shouldn't they NOT use a 502 page? Seems to me that offline google should have known what to do, but not for me it didn't.

Also, i'm not logging in for this comment, and i'll never come back to check replies, i just wanted to mention that the offline service seems to have been useless in this situation.

First Post!

[uijltje]

...using Gmail.

Hmmm...

[Anonymous Coward]

Well it IS still in beta! :rolleyes:

Treadmill?!!

[Keeper Of Keys]

Why on Earth would anyone buy a treadmill? Don't you have any streets, parks, ground of any kind where you are? Maybe you should have bought an albatross while you were at it.

Re:Treadmill?!!

[Obfiscator]

There are some good reasons for a treadmill. When you live in Minneapolis and it's the middle of winter, for example (snow, ice, and cold temperatures are not ideal running conditions for most people). Or even if you live in the middle of the city and get tired of dodging traffic/waiting for the light to change.

Or even if you're just starting out as a runner and are still a little self-conscious. If buying a treadmill will help you start working out, more power to ya, mate.

Re:Treadmill?!!

[Slightly Askew]

Why?

• Crime
• Snow
• Dark/Safety
• Incline
• Child Care
• Probably a dozen other reasons

Re:Treadmill?!!

[fyrewulff]

I have plenty of ground, parks, etc here. But I also have a treadmill, because:

* Treadmill lets me run without having to have a shirt on
* I can listen to music without having to worry about cars/dogs/other people trying to shiv me
* Omaha is way too hilly so the treadmill provides a nice even consistent flat ground so I can worry more about running than hill climbing

It really shouldn't matter how someone is running, as long as they are running.

Still not back to normal here

[damn_registrars]

It looks like they are at 16 hours and counting of interrupted service. I also see that I can connect via POP but not the web interface.

Re:Still not back to normal here

[Yakisoba_noodle]

Yeah. Google does have great uptime, generally speaking. And it's true that it takes some years for an in house e-mail system to catch up. Of course, you have to get used to the idea that every word you send through anything Google is searched, indexed and stored. They sift all of it, and you sign an agreement when you sign up with them that this is OK. And of course, their service agreement is "best effort" so you can't fault them for any amount of downtime. Would you hire a mail admin with that caveat? He'll make it work, as much as he can, but if he does not, you can't hold him responsible. He's cheap though, of course. I don't know too many folks that would make that hire. So why use Google? The answer is if you don't mind the search (making money off your IP potentially) or the cost (you're using it for less than three years or so, even for a MS compare) and you have execs that are comfy with the "blame Google" response when the thing breaks. There are plenty of small businesses and folks that don't mind all that, but for the enterprise, it's a harder sell.

Translation

[elrous0]

I think it's translated in New Jersey as "All Youz".

big deal...

[dogganos]

taking our limited life scope into consideration, it is ridiculous to worry about a... 2h gmail outage...

igoogle could access

[Anonymous Coward]

I could access correctly with IGoogle gmail gadget!!!

Do Programmers Dream of Electric Clouds?

[slashdotjunker]

This Gmail outage is provoking concerns over the reliability of cloud computing. However, there is nothing to be concerned about. Gmail actually has little to do with cloud computing. It is a hosted service. The appropriate paradigm for Gmail is black box.

Gmail is single point of failure. Your data is stored at one location. When that location is unavailable your data is inaccessible. An opaque, inscutable black box is the correct analogy.

If you were actually applying the principles of cloud computing to email then your data would be replicated among several black box vendors. The outage of a single vendor would not cut off your access.

In short, we dream of the promise of cloud computing but very few true cloud computing services have been implemented. The most conspicuous example of a working cloud computing service is IP packet routing and IMHO it works great.

Story posted after downtime

[Viperlin]

This was a tad late :) during the downtime, both my python google scripts and my android G1 were functioning correctly with the odd garbled text in the python script instead of an "unread" number.
the G1 didn't have any issues updating itself, i am therefore going to assume it uses imap, but don't quote me on that!

"Gmail is single point of failure." - all singular email services and hosting companies are a single point of failure, in this case, merely webmail access was down. businesses who relied on google via pop/imap did not even notice. Not to mention, google offer convenient backups of all your data in a tarball, if there was ever a failure, it is your own fault for not downloading these on a regular basis, you can also re-upload these tarballs in the event of a failure or to move to a new login.