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Gmail was down

google.com

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Re: Gmail was down

#291

Post by dredmorbius »

thrush wrote: post #164
vex wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I think an even better question may be, why isn't there a decentralized approach to email to compete with centralized alternatives like Gmail. Imagine that you could still use your email when Gmail goes down, but you would lose a lot of features like autocomplete, search, recommended recipients, etc.

IMAP

Re: Gmail was down

#293

Post by daigoba66 »

smacktoward wrote: post #261
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…

The "killer feature" of Gmail that people generally cite is its spam filtering, and that is hard to replicate, because one reason Google's spam filters are so good is because they have an enormous corpus of messages at hand to train them with. This presents would-be competitors with a chicken-and-egg problem: you need lots of users to be able to pull together a corpus like that, but you can't attract lots of users wi…

Google used to have spam filtering as a (pay to use) service: http://www.google.com/postini. My e-mail (I don't use gmail) used it before it was shutdown. Now they use http://www.roaringpenguin.com/.

Re: Gmail was down

#294

Post by azth »

yarone wrote: post #280
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.

I pay backupify.com $5 per month to backup my gmail, gcal, gdocs, etc.

Do you trust their security?

Re: Gmail was down

#295

Post by TrainedMonkey »

reeses wrote: post #284
dude3 wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You should be. That was very naughty of you.

Re: Gmail was down

#296

Post by Myrmornis »

mintplant wrote: post #22

Top of the front page in less than a minute. What does it say about us that our first response is to rush over to HN?

I came to HN because it is the one place where I knew I might find some intelligent discussion of why it was down.

Re: Gmail was down

#298

Post by eli »

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.

I still can't attach files or use my contacts. Seems pretty flaky.

Re: Gmail was down

#300

Post by fletchowns »

spyder wrote: post #276
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 most painful thing is to change your e-mail in the services where you used it for sign up. The data export doesn't look hard: http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/12/google...

That's why you use Google Apps for Domain with a domain name you have control over. That way you can switch providers but keep the same email address.
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