Outage Knocks Gmail Offline For Many Users

Many readers noted an outage affecting Google's gmail service last night. Firmafest points to a statement from Google, according to which only a small subset of users were affected. According to reader CaptHarlock, mail itself remained accessible through IMAP clients, and the chat feature via external applications. jw3 asks "Of course, gmail is just one of the many providers of web-based e-mails. When I look around, almost everyone seems to be using them nowadays. So — what do you do? Do you trust that the site of your web-based e-mail provider will never go down? Do you make backups of all your e-mails?" (Some readers still seem to be unable to reach the site, too.)

Thunderbird Public Service Announcement

[eldavojohn]

Use Thunderbird [mozilla.com] with GMail [mozillazine.org] and configure it so that every time there's a new message it is synced to your local hard drive but also left on the server (IMAP probably though I think the same can be done with POP).

My linux box at home has been doing this for years, I just leave Thunderbird open and set my monitor to sleep after 15 minutes of inactivity. I don't care if my GMail and college mail accounts temporarily go down, it's all mirrored on that machine.

Anti-Microsoft zealot bonus rant: I stopped using Hotmail when I realized I could not access it outside of Outlook Express ... I'm aware of ways [freepops.org] around [izymail.com] this but there's a simpler solution: don't use Hotmail. This and the fact that (last I checked) it didn't support forwarding are two very good reasons to move on to a free mail service more dedicated to you. The choice is yours.

Re:Thunderbird Public Service Announcement

[4D6963]

Yes, it's in the server/mail options. It's easy to find.

Good thing Google offers IMAP

[trmanco]

I always had access to my emails, just:

Enable IMAP:

http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=77695 [google.com]

and configure your email client:

http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=75726 [google.com]

No Gmail fail for me...

Re:Thunderbird Public Service Announcement

[morgan_greywolf]

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

Re:Thunderbird Public Service Announcement

[Admodieus]

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

Re:Call me stupid....

[Spazztastic]

You could always pay for hosting, and store your encrypted files on an FTP site, right?

This. $10 a month and I can have an off site backup. $20 a month and I can have TWO off site backups for my personal data, all encrypted using GnuPG/Trucrypt/whatever both on separate continents. Stop using the "GOOGLE IS MY ONLY OPTION" excuse, there's plenty of other ways to back up your data.

Personally, I use SSHFS and all my files are stored on my home server. Nightly they're archived, encrypted. and shot off to a datacenter in Chicago. It costs me $20 a month for the bandwidth and storage, and it's all encrypted.

Re:Never go down?

[mmkkbb]

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

99.9% uptime reliability guarantee

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

Re:Thunderbird Public Service Announcement

[spyrochaete]

I do what you do, but I recently switched from Thunderbird to Windows Live Mail (a free, better Microsoft mail client than the lame Windows Mail which comes with Vista). Thunderbird is an exceptional mail client that does a great job of handling multiple addresses, but the only thing Windows Live Mail does better is that it allows mail to be indexed and searched from the Vista start button.

BTW I use POP3 but configured Gmail to automatically keep a copy of each mail in its archives. I'm doubly protected this way - if either goes down I can rely on my backup, or I can sync one with the other.

Re:Google Apps for Business.

[slim]

Here's the SLA [google.com].

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

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

Re:Never go down?

[jimicus]

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

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

Re:Ma.gnolia!

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't follow that link.

Re:Thunderbird Public Service Announcement

[aschran]

Sure I guess that would work, but I prefer not to annoy my friends and family with extra tags and funky punctuation. So its simpler to just have a separate gmail account, or a hotmail account... or whatever.

It's not like it's particularly complicated to work around that. You could blacklist email sent to [e-mail], except for those emails sent from whitelisted family members. Or you could combine the two: have [e-mail] unfiltered to use for your friends and family, and only use the tag-filtering method for [e-mail]. Mainly I just wanted to point out that Gmail +tags are not useless and "trivial to get around."

Re:Thunderbird Public Service Announcement

[Fëanáro]

The TO-header can and often will be set to anything by the spammers

So a lot of the spam that you get which does not contain your email address at all might have been sent to the [e-mail] alias

The envelope-to header is the one that cannot be forged, but gmail does not allow you to filter based on it.

Don't do that

[an.echte.trilingue]

Be careful with this, though, because a lot of places you wouldn't expect don't support the + sign. For example, when I had to renew my SSL cert after the debian ssl debacle, I had a problem: the email I used was [e-mail]. Thawte has no problem sending junk email to this address, and they accepted it just fine when I initially accepted the cert, but when I went to renew the it, their system was silently dropping the plus and throwing an error when I tried to confirm the reissue.

Their technical support was no help either. After talking with some douche called "Jeremy E", he simply informed me that the best he could do was change the address to [e-mail], which of course is equivalent to [e-mail] and not my address. He then did this without waiting for my approval and sent the reissue information to some total stranger (I tried to register it, it was taken). I never did get them to change the address, nor to reissue the cert.

You would think that a business like SSL certs that charges extortionate (hundreds of dollars) prices for something that an automated system does would have a working email system, but no. I ended up having to buy a new cert from another company.

By the way, THAWTE AND VERISIGN SUCK