Outage Knocks Gmail Offline For Many Users 209
Many readers noted an outage affecting Google's gmail service last night. Firmafest points to a statement from Google, according to which only a small subset of users were affected. According to reader CaptHarlock, mail itself remained accessible through IMAP clients, and the chat feature via external applications. jw3 asks "Of course, gmail is just one of the many providers of web-based e-mails. When I look around, almost everyone seems to be using them nowadays. So — what do you do? Do you trust that the site of your web-based e-mail provider will never go down? Do you make backups of all your e-mails?" (Some readers still seem to be unable to reach the site, too.)
I don't know about the rest of you (Score:3, Interesting)
Did it for the extra speed increase of having all my mail/attachments pre-downloaded, but this also means that I still had access to everything in my account prior to the outage.
So instead of loosing my email, I just had a delay in getting *new* emails.
small subset? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:I don't know about the rest of you (Score:3, Interesting)
^Win.
Welcome to the new web, where there are solutions for age-old problems like downtime. ;-)
I was also affected, but it was past my bedtime anyway so I didn't worry too much about it. As long as there's not an extended outage, I'll be fine.
Re:Thunderbird Public Service Announcement (Score:5, Interesting)
Great job, Google.
Re:Thunderbird Public Service Announcement (Score:5, Interesting)
Shift+Delete deletes the message without copying it to the trash folder, and is also supposed to compact the folder (if you have that preference set). However, some users report that Shift+Delete doesn't always compact the folder.
That link has something on why what he's asking for isn't possible:
Remove it immediately
"Remove it immediately" doesn't actually remove the message despite its name. It just hides it from view and flags the message as deleted. That appears to be because Thunderbird doesn't support the optional UID Expunge command, which requires the server to support the optional UIDPLUS capability. It will be physically deleted when you compact the folder.
Although that page was last touched on Oct 2008 they may have added that functionality, I'm not sure ... but it may frustrate users to add that feature when the server doesn't support UIDPLUS. Like I said, not an expert though I think this may actually not be possible.
Re:Thunderbird Public Service Announcement (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Never go down? (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm sure I'm not the only person here who has worked on systems where an hour of downtime meant many thousands of dollars of lost sales. If being down for 4 hours a month costs you $40,000 in lost sales and $12,000 in lost profits, then be willing to spend $12,000 per month more to get the extra 4 hours per month of uptime. If people rely on a free service without a sufficient SLA for this type of business, then they are being foolish.
Personally I host my domains' emails through Google. You know what? I didn't even know it was down. And even if I did, I wouldn't have really cared that much. I would have done one of the many many many other things on my to-do list that don't require email access, and would have expected that if a client was trying to reach me that badly during that period, they'd have just picked up the phone and called.
Google Apps for Business. (Score:4, Interesting)
I am a business customer of Google's. We use their apps and e-mail package.
"99.9% Gmail, Google Calendar and Google Talk uptime SLA"
The service was down for over 45 minutes, how do you think google will react to a refund request? I'm probably not going to make one, but do you think many people are? Has anybody here? How did it go?
Re:Call me stupid.... (Score:3, Interesting)
You could always pay for hosting, and store your encrypted files on an FTP site, right?
This. $10 a month and I can have an off site backup. $20 a month and I can have TWO off site backups for my personal data, all encrypted using GnuPG/Trucrypt/whatever both on separate continents. Stop using the "GOOGLE IS MY ONLY OPTION" excuse, there's plenty of other ways to back up your data.
Personally, I use SSHFS and all my files are stored on my home server. Nightly they're archived, encrypted. and shot off to a datacenter in Chicago. It costs me $20 a month for the bandwidth and storage, and it's all encrypted.
I do that with Amazon S3. The data is backed up in two locations (US and Europe). It costs me 0.83 USD last month.
Re:Thunderbird Public Service Announcement (Score:5, Interesting)
You don't even need to use Hotmail for spam anymore. Instead, you can use GMail's (+) feature. So...when signing up on a site, type something like...
your.email+spam@gmail.com
Put whatever you want after the + sign. It will still route directly to your inbox. Then, just setup a filter to put anything with "+spam" to the spam folder or the trash or wherever.
It's a beautiful thing.