And it's back.
Gmail was down
191–200 of 476 posts
Re: Gmail was down
#192Why is there no alternative webmail of the caliber of gmail? Is it a difficult problem? If there were such an alternative, all they would need to do is wait until gmail fouls up, as they did here. Then they'd have a flood of new users. I can imagine a few reasons why there currently isn't an alternative, like network effects stemming from your contact list, or the fact that you'd have to change your email address eve…
Have you tried outlook.com?
Disclosure: I work for Microsoft (not outlook.com team though).
Re: Gmail was down
#193Earlier quoted context omitted.
I took off my headphones and asked the office: "anyone else having gmail issues?" Everyone burst into laughter. They had been talking about it for minutes.
One could argue that you were just being productive and doing your work.
If only HN would go down at the same time so we really could get a ton of work done!
Re: Gmail was down
#194Say where you are located. It is down for me, SF Bay Area (east bay).
Jersey
Re: Gmail was down
#195YouTube comments and Google+ as well.
Same for me. YouTube already acted weird for the last few hours.
Re: Gmail was down
#196GMAIL WORKS
Re: Gmail was down
#197Why is there no alternative webmail of the caliber of gmail? Is it a difficult problem? If there were such an alternative, all they would need to do is wait until gmail fouls up, as they did here. Then they'd have a flood of new users. I can imagine a few reasons why there currently isn't an alternative, like network effects stemming from your contact list, or the fact that you'd have to change your email address eve…
I don't think there are network effects, really. The contact list you can export just fine. I think it's just a good product overall.
- The search is very good, even searches within attachments.
- You can have large attachments.
- Doesn't run out of space and is free.
- Spam detection is flawless. I've rarely had anything important fall into spam. Alternatives like spambayes are not nearly as good.
- The threading is excellent. Most competing products suck at this.
- The keyboard shortcuts are comprehensive and save me tons of time. Most competing products suck at this.
- Labels and filters are super powerful and save me tons of time. Most competing products suck at this.
I don't like any of the non-webmail alternatives, simply because they are not webmail, and you can't get to them from everywhere.
Alternatives seem to be:
- http://openwebmail.org/ (pretty bad)
- http://squirrelmail.org/ (also pretty terrible)
edit:
Looks like mailpile is closest to what I want, with a open source and modern python stack, super clean and simple UI, focus on the right features. But it's fairly alpha. On the other hand, they seem to have gotten some 160k of crowdfunding, so the main developers seem dedicated.
Fastmail also seems to be the best non-open alternative around, imho.
edit2:
Somewhat disappointed that mailpile seems to have reinvented the wheel multiple times by not using an existing web framework / search server.
Re: Gmail was down
#198I've been having intermittent problems with the GMail-integrated Talk / Hangouts client all day as well.
Re: Gmail was down
#199Very funny that me and my coworkers at nearly the same time opened our office doors to look into each others eyes and silently confirm that we were having the same issue. Then we all turned around and went back into our offices to check HN to see if it was just us. Very funny that everyone reading this did something similar. 84 points in 4 minutes.
It's back up for me.
Re: Gmail was down
#200This actually raises a slightly terrifying reality. How much would someone have to pay you to never again recover your gMail account? I would demand just an absurd payout to willingly walk away right now, with all those contacts, messages, unread e-mails, organization, etc... Scary how much faith we put in this free service.
I could drop it without too much pain, honestly. It wouldn't cost that much for me to delete my gmail accounts.
But I learned to own my data where it matters and not sweat the rest ages ago. (Stopped compulsively "hoarding")