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Gmail was down

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Re: Gmail was down

#431

Post by malandrew »

larrys wrote: post #396
avenger123 wrote: post #385

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's sometimes great pleasure to see how an original topic in HN starts delving into side topics that have nothing to do with the original. I thought it was a one-off thing but seems to happen quite a bit.

Nothing wrong with a good fork! The original post is sometimes just kindling for other discussions. What can you really say about gmail being down that is that interesting? (That is a question....)

Would be interesting if we could flag a side conversation and they appear collapsed by default, with a button like "Off Topic. Click to Expand."

Re: Gmail was down

#432

Post by malandrew »

ericd wrote: post #345
matznerd wrote: post #338

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.

For cooking stuff, Cook's Illustrated is the reference. Are there better recipes and cooking equipment reviews out there? Definitely. But it's generally of very high quality.

Re: Gmail was down

#434

Post by instakill »

IgorPartola wrote: post #327
btilly wrote: 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…

Agreed about online reviews being imperfect. However one way to counteract extreme subjectivity is context. If you know somebody in person, you'll be able to understand their online review a lot better than you would a complete stranger's. Having access to reviews of friends and family and people you choose to follow is why I built http://www.mybema.com

Re: Gmail was down

#436

Post by abrahamsen »

IgorPartola wrote: post #327
btilly wrote: 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…

This is why Google did the right thing tying their reviews to their social network. If I know the person doing the review, I can put it in context. There are people whose opinion on wireless routers I'd listen to, and people I wouldn't.

A lot of people got angry at the time, and publicly declared they wouldn't review any more. But that's not really a big loss. Their reviews might be the most qualified out there, but as long as they were anonymous I would be unable to put them in context, and they would be of very limited value to me.

Re: Gmail was down

#437

Post by kackontent »

abvdasker wrote: post #286
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

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…

Thanks for mentioning RainLoop,I was looking at various open source webmails and wasn't happy with them (Mailpile looks promising though), but never before run into RainLoop, looks like a winner.

Re: Gmail was down

#438

Post by ithkuil »

umsm wrote: post #246
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.

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.

You should definitely do backups.

But I'm pretty sure that in the vast majority of outages you'll suffer with gmail you won't have the time to recover you're backup before the service is back up.

That said, you should definitely do backups. It's just that it wouldn't have helped in this case.

Re: Gmail was down

#439

Post by blowski »

amatix wrote: post #425
umsm wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

We use Backupify at TechHub. It works great.

Re: Gmail was down

#440

Post by shangxiao »

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.

My coworkers and I... sheesh are we becoming so lazy that we can't use correct grammar ;)
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