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Gmail was down

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Re: Gmail was down

#351
post #14

No Google status update as of the time of the orignal post, but a quick Twitter search suggests this is a widespread problem: https://twitter.com/search?q=gmail

Google gets access to the restricted Twitter firehose; you'd think they'd add it as another monitoring source.

    Google gets access to the restricted Twitter firehose
This went away in mid 2011: http://searchengineland.com/as-deal-with-twitter-expires-goo...

Re: Gmail was down

#352

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 think it is a testament to how quickly relevant news for people like us rises here. Hacker News is working as intended and I think it's fantastic.

Re: Gmail was down

#353

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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")

the problem resides on big companies. I use google apps for email, and it's almost impossible to backup all the mails..

http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/12/google...

is adequate for me. What's so devastatingly wrong about that feature that makes it "almost impossible" to use?

Re: Gmail was down

#354

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…

My GMail was back up in minutes. It would take a great deal of effort for me to move my years of Google Mail (professional and personal), Contacts, Calendars, and Drive-based documents to some other service.

To their credit Google makes it very easy to get your data out. I was really surprised how easy it was to transition to different services.

Re: Gmail was down

#355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I trust some reviews of some products by some people. I differentiate. For example, for car reviews I read Edmunds reviews but don't trust all of their opinions. They don't try to do anything with car reliability which really sucks, but they can't. You don't know what's what until you've owned the car for 10 years, and they are reviewing new cars. I trust my mechanic friend much more here since he can actually look under the hood and tell me if the type of car has a transmission that's prone to go bad, or an engine that's going to burn oil. It's possible that he's pulling his opinions out of his own biases, but what he says usually makes internal sense so I feel better if he tells me something is good or bad.

I don't trust good restaurant reviews, and only trust bad ones if they cite specific issues, like using wrong ingredients, etc. I trust my friends and family when they say a place is good or bad much more because I know their tastes and I can ask followup questions.

For electronics, I pretty much don't trust anyone with anything unless something is backed by the manufacturer. I only trust Apple products because of Apple Care. Everyone has had a bad experience with a laptop, a phone, a tablet, a mouse, a USB cable, etc. It's not worth listening to most times since it's usually a horror story from 10 years ago about a company that who's had their entire manufacturing line re-tooled since.

On Amazon for a generic product, the biggest indication to me is if there are lots of reviews. That means lots of people own the product. If most of the reviews are one star, it's a crappy product. If not, it could be good or bad and I personally find very little correlation between the way I perceive a product and its Amazon reviews.

Re: Gmail was down

#356
post #333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

But the point is that it might not be necessary to record those conversations, even though they were large life events. Why do you need to re-read the transcript of you telling your wife that your mom got hit by a car?

Re: Gmail was down

#357

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…

I've heard terrific things about fastmail.fm's web client. Many people say it's faster and has most of Gmail's cherished features. Edit: plus, no Google-snooping of course.

No Google-snooping, and there never will be.

Re: Gmail was down

#358

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

My brain hurts from contemplating what you wrote. The point of gmail is that they take the configuration and headache of maintaining a mail server away from you. If you're okay with running your own qmail/sendmail, then there are vastly better open source UI options than gmail. Google didn't invent email. They just run some of the world's largest mail servers as a (mostly) free service.

>there are vastly better open source UI options than gmail.

Really? Because I haven't found a web front-end as good. Otherwise I am happy running my own mail server.

Re: Gmail was down

#359
post #345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Consumer Reports is actually pretty damn good for most things, especially in terms of reliability ratings. Good reviews is one of the things I'm happy to pay for, since the web doesn't seem to have spawned a good free alternative.

Ah, that convinced me to actually buy membership. Thanks for spreading the word.

Re: Gmail was down

#360

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…

Why would an alternative service (or self hosting or whatever) be better at reliability than Google?
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