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Gmail was down

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Re: Gmail was down

#422
post #349

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You fucking changed my life.

Come back in a month and let us know if you still have it enabled.

I've had it on for at least a year. 1 hour on, 2 hours off. It usefully slows me down when I get into a "someone is wrong on the Internet" mood.

I also highly recommend Leechblock [1] for Firefox. On my work machine, I have it set to give me an N second delay when visiting a long list of fun sites. As I watch the N seconds tick down, that's enough time for me to ask myself, "Do I really need to look at Facebook now?" Interestingly, N appears to be somewhat variable depending on circumstance. 10 seconds is enough normally, but when I'm not getting enough exercise or am dealing with work I don't want to do, N goes higher.

I also am currently loving Kanban Flow [2]. It's a Kanban board that has a built-in Pomodoro timer. (Briefly, the Pomodoro method involves working in 30-minute blocks with a mandatory 5-minute break. At the end it asks you if you've been focused; if you are, you get credit for the time.

[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/leechblock/ [2] http://kanbanflow.com/

Re: Gmail was down

#425
post #246

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.

Each one of us has the power to do something about it: Perform a Backup. We should be downloading our mailbox with our contacts on a regular basis. I'm guilty for not doing this, but seems like an area that can use a SaaS.

https://www.backupify.com/ do this for Google Apps - works pretty well.

Re: Gmail was down

#426

Google has published an outage report: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2014/01/todays-outage-for-sev...

It's strange that Google did not make validation/testing to configuration files in isolated servers, before publish them to production servers.

Re: Gmail was down

#430
post #321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly, my gmail gets a lot more spam (and I mean into my Inbox ) than the self-hosted email that I actually use (I rarely touch my gmail). Also they seem to engage in very spammer-friendly activities such as notifying spammers if and when you read their spam email (if images are turned on by default). Soooo, I can't imagine that competing against their spam filtering is as impossible as people tend to believe.

Now they're caching each image once for all users, which pretty much defeats that.

Not really, now you just have to have a unique image URL for each email you send. How could they possibly tell they are the same image before downloading them?
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