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Gmail was down

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Re: Gmail was down

#333
post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Were they the most important words you say to her, though? Most of humanity has constantly been forgetting most of the conversation they've had with their loved ones. Maybe it is not reasonable to try to hold on to the literal incarnation of daily banalities.

What's important? I guess when I proposed, we were in the middle of Venice, so that wasn't recorded. But when we came up with the name for our dog it was. My mom got hit by a car once, I think I told her over chat. I don't see any emotional difference between chat and in person. But I can understand that some people do.

Re: Gmail was down

#334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

Go to https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=stephenhuey and change noprocrast to yes.

Re: Gmail was down

#335

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.

Sounds like Google made for one romantic moment.

Re: Gmail was down

#336
post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a very important principle. For a time, Target used Amazon's website code. Here is what they found. People leave reviews of books that they like. People only bother reviewing microwave machines when they didn't work. This meant that Amazon's code didn't work out as well for Target as it did for Amazon...

The whole online review thing is thoroughly broken. I am not even talking about people leaving bad reviews for things like "the seller didn't ship it on time", etc. I am talking about the fact that most people that leave a review have nothing to compare the product to. For example, try shopping for a wireless router. You'll find lots of people either praising or bashing it but having no basis for comparison. Star rat…

If you want to fix this with me drop me a note. I have an idea, a design and a viable business model.

Re: Gmail was down

#337

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.

Maybe I'm unusual, but I wouldn't be terribly upset if my two gmail accounts (totaling 6gb of stuff) were wiped clean. I'm always at 'inbox zero', so everything is really just an archive. Anyone I have in my contacts whose email address is unavailable to me elsewhere is probably not someone I'm going to be contacting, anyway, and I never, ever look at chat logs.

All in I'd probably let it go for a couple hundred bucks.

Re: Gmail was down

#338
post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a very important principle. For a time, Target used Amazon's website code. Here is what they found. People leave reviews of books that they like. People only bother reviewing microwave machines when they didn't work. This meant that Amazon's code didn't work out as well for Target as it did for Amazon...

The whole online review thing is thoroughly broken. I am not even talking about people leaving bad reviews for things like "the seller didn't ship it on time", etc. I am talking about the fact that most people that leave a review have nothing to compare the product to. For example, try shopping for a wireless router. You'll find lots of people either praising or bashing it but having no basis for comparison. Star rat…

Are there offline reviews that are better? Do you trust the information of a salesperson better? I think there are definitely problems with a selection bias of who leaves reviews, but sites like Amazon have implemented a number of features to improve upon them like rating distributions (how many 5, 4, 3 ,2, and 1s), the vine program, reviewer rankings, verified purchases, large volumes etc.

Re: Gmail was down

#339
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

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 horr…

I've been using, and contributing to, Sovereign. It's fantastic. Even if you are only looking for a mail server, you can point it to a VPS and let it do its magic. Zero trouble, self-hosted IMAP/POP3/SMTP/Webmail. https://github.com/al3x/sovereign

Re: Gmail was down

#340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't find postfix all that hard to set up. Courier, on the other hand, is a disaster area, which is why my mail server runs dovecot instead; the latter took little effort to configure, and works quite nicely across several devices. The really hard part was finding a halfway decent CalDAV/CardDAV server that didn't require undue suffering to configure; I settled on Baïkal, which works okay, but could be considerab…

Thanks for the tip on dovecot. I'll give that a shot.

Do; I spent half a day wrestling with courier and lost, and it took me less than an hour to get dovecot up and doing what I wanted.
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