Side note: Love the 2010-era web design. Wtf happened? Everything got bloated, buttons got huge and whitespace took over the screen real-estate.
> Wtf happened Money
Go on...
Gmail having issues
241–250 of 460 posts
Re: Gmail having issues
#242Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've had way more downtime trying to run my own domain's mailserver for a year than I have with gmail for more than a decade.
That's not what I said. With some emphasis added: > When this happens , you can spin up a temporary server and have a mechanism in place to redirect email so you don't go down when your provider does. Use a commercial provider, but fall back to your own server when it goes down without changing your email address.
I see two problems here: The likelihood your service is restored before you spin up your own mail server, and the fact that, not expecting this failure, their DNS may have a fairly lengthy TTL.
Re: Gmail having issues
#243Earlier quoted context omitted.
Use a paid email host, just anything but Google. Life's too short to put up with managing your own email server.
It can as well be Google, just the paid Apps version. Zero time to get used to a different UI. I suspect there must be a solution to easily migrate all your tags and filtering rules. (Tags are the killer feature to me. Outlook sort of has them but they are less flexible.)
does the paid apps version have better uptime? Is it not affected by the current issues?
Re: Gmail having issues
#244Earlier quoted context omitted.
I said this in another comment but this seems like a naive way to react to an "address does not exist error" that they've already delivered to before. The only legit scenario in which that happens is when the user deletes the address, which is a rare event (pretty much always The underlying issue (wherever this occurs) seems to be lack of nuance regarding error codes when people try to implement robust systems. Diffe…
Good callout. The underlying issue of the lack of nuance is probably /state/. Being more nuanced about these errors probably requires managing state, which tends to increase the complexity and scaling challenges.
Right. In this case it's already pretty typical for mailing lists to track bounces and retry under some errors, so I imagined that part is mostly done, and the missing piece would be taking more care in checking the error conditions.
Re: Gmail having issues
#245As quite a few googlers appear to read and write on HN, I'd really welcome an insider info on what's going on the last few days. Sure there will be some internal turmoil going on right now, but isn't there some non-confidential info to share? Can't imagine this will hurt the image of google neither in the short nor long run, quite the opposite.
I don’t work at Google, I’m at a different big tech that’s in the news frequently. Sharing inside info on an ongoing incident is a great way to get fired. Big tech companies are way different than startups where everyone can do a bit of anything. There are people whose job it is to handle that communication. You make their job a lot harder if you disclose information. The company is so big that as an engineer you may…
Stop being such a corporate slave. These companies wouldn’t hesitate to kick you out on the street if they had to
Re: Gmail having issues
#246I use Helm for email. It’s a silent little server in my living room routed via Amazon (using a TLS cert that lives in my living room). I’d say about every three or four months it goes down for 5 minutes if I need to reboot my wifi router. I use it for privacy (am a fan) but I feel pretty smug knowing I’m getting better reliability too. At least this month :) No affiliation with the company. https://www.thehelm.com/
I remember seeing this when it first popped up on HN. Very cool. Home internet is pretty reliable these days and my sense is that it’s getting better, not worse, as people value their internet connectivity more.
Is your data backed up anywhere in case your Helm box burns in a fire?
Re: Gmail having issues
#247As quite a few googlers appear to read and write on HN, I'd really welcome an insider info on what's going on the last few days. Sure there will be some internal turmoil going on right now, but isn't there some non-confidential info to share? Can't imagine this will hurt the image of google neither in the short nor long run, quite the opposite.
Since so little time has passed since the last issue, I am wondering if it could be the same cause. Maybe they didn’t fix it properly the first time.
it's got a similar flavor - that was identity management going down, this is "that email account doesn't exist".
Re: Gmail having issues
#248Remember, free and open source software is more reliable: (https://www.gnu.org/software/reliability.en.html)
"One reason is that free software gets the whole community involved in working together to fix problems. Users not only report bugs, they even fix bugs and send in fixes. Users work together, conversing by email, to get to the bottom of a problem and make the software work trouble-free."
And Service as a Software Substitute (SaaSS) takes away your freedom: (https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/who-does-that-server-really-s...)
"The basic point is, you can have control over a program someone else wrote (if it's free), but you can never have control over a service someone else runs, so never use a service where in principle a program would do.
With free software, we, the users, take back control of our computing. Proprietary software still exists, but we can exclude it from our lives and many of us have done so. However, we are now offered another tempting way to cede control over our computing: Service as a Software Substitute (SaaSS). For our freedom's sake, we have to reject that too.
With SaaSS, the server operator can change the software in use on the server. He ought to be able to do this, since it's his computer; but the result is the same as using a proprietary application program with a universal back door: someone has the power to silently impose changes in how the user's computing gets done.
Thus, SaaSS is equivalent to running proprietary software with spyware and a universal back door. It gives the server operator unjust power over the user, and that power is something we must resist."
Re: Gmail having issues
#249Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's not what I said. With some emphasis added: > When this happens , you can spin up a temporary server and have a mechanism in place to redirect email so you don't go down when your provider does. Use a commercial provider, but fall back to your own server when it goes down without changing your email address.
I see two problems here: The likelihood your service is restored before you spin up your own mail server, and the fact that, not expecting this failure, their DNS may have a fairly lengthy TTL.
https://mailinabox.email/ Can be set up relatively quickly
Re: Gmail having issues
#250Earlier quoted context omitted.
I said this in another comment but this seems like a naive way to react to an "address does not exist error" that they've already delivered to before. The only legit scenario in which that happens is when the user deletes the address, which is a rare event (pretty much always The underlying issue (wherever this occurs) seems to be lack of nuance regarding error codes when people try to implement robust systems. Diffe…
Good callout. The underlying issue of the lack of nuance is probably /state/. Being more nuanced about these errors probably requires managing state, which tends to increase the complexity and scaling challenges.
Nuance is not called for. The standard states that a 5xx SMTP error is a permanent error and "The SMTP client SHOULD NOT repeat the exact request"
Gmail screwed up here, returning a 550 error, it's not anyone else's job to try to second guess that or retry in contradiction of the accepted standard.