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Gmail was down

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Re: Gmail was down

#281

Post by alecdbrooks »

jedbrown wrote: post #129
sheetjs wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The cynic will say "karma whoring" but I think it's actually because it increases the likelihood that something will happen. For example, when there were coinbase issues, people wouldn't get responses for weeks. However, once a post about the delays hit the front page, the founders finally responded. So no, I'm not surprised this happened and I wouldn't be surprised to see a swift response

Do you seriously think upvotes on HN have any impact on Google's motivation to get Gmail back up?

I agree: I think the effect of HN commenting on its downtime is nonexistent for high-profile products from a giant company. Maybe if Slashdot picked up on downtime of a Google Labs product in 2004, you'd see an accelerated response, but that Google doesn't exist anymore.

The most I could see is some people from Google commenting here to give some slightly more technical than average canned response in order to flatter potential recruits. (And even that is so unlikely that I wouldn't assume any Google employees commenting here are doing that unless they gave the game away somehow.)

Re: Gmail was down

#282

Post by TrainedMonkey »

simonsarris wrote: post #42

Very 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.

The intensity and speed this thread rose up on HN illustrates a very important principle. People are more likely to leave a review/comment/upvote if something is not working for them.

Understanding that is useful when comparing products using reviews.

Re: Gmail was down

#284

Post by reeses »

dude3 wrote: post #94
gk1 wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well it's a selection bias. The many people who did not do something similar are not here to say so.

I quipped "Today must be my last day"...

I terminated a relationship with a consulting client right before the outage and thought,"How the hell did they manage that?"

Then I realized I probably broke Google by dragging their folder from clients to clients/retired.

Sorry about that.

Re: Gmail was down

#285

Post by SilasX »

sillysaurus2 wrote: post #244
JohnBooty wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is there no alternative webmail of the caliber of gmail? Is it a difficult problem? Are you serious?

I'm old enough to remember that gmail was largely the creation of one person; a person who was neither a programming god nor business guru. It's tempting to think that we could sit down and make an open source gmail clone.

Who?

Re: Gmail was down

#286

Post by abvdasker »

vex wrote: post #140
sillysaurus2 wrote: post #69

Why 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…

A better question is, why isn't there an open source webmail service like gmail that can be run on a server you control? My lab uses Gmail for business, and the outage took us down too. I just want to be able to run an email server that has conversation features, contacts, XMPP chat, etc, but isn't Microsoft Exchange

So coincidentally I was just looking into this earlier this week. I just got a server to host the blog I've been working on and figured hey, why don't I try self-hosting my email while I'm at it.

Turns out there are plenty of good open source webmail frameworks: Roundcube, Mailpile, Zimbra and RainLoop are all freely available and ridiculously easy to set up.

The issue is that they're all just front-ends for the horribly complex and difficult to configure backend of a modern email server (SMTP/POP3/IMAP). You can configure them to hook into Google/Yahoo/Other smtp servers, but then why bother — you're back where you started.

I had no understanding of how broken email was until I tried to set up a simple SMTP + IMAP server using postfix + courier.

Re: Gmail was down

#287

Post by vezzy-fnord »

And I thought the reaction to Michael Jackson's death was huge...

This will probably go down in history as quite a record. I'll wait for the post-downtime analytics.

Re: Gmail was down

#288

Post by cpprototypes »

psbp wrote: post #199
simonsarris wrote: post #42

Very 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.

It seems to be back up, but struggling under the load of probably millions of users checking their email.

Re: Gmail was down

#289

Post by swalsh »

pkfrank wrote: post #170

This 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.

The crazy thing is, the email means less to me than the chat logs. Maybe 60% of the words i've ever said to my wife have been over gchat while we're at work.
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