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Gmail was down

google.com

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Re: Gmail was down

#441

Post by scholia »

josephlord wrote: post #419
scholia wrote: post #413

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's very risky to put all your eggs in one basket. Why not spread stuff around?

There is a trade off between availability (spread it around) and privacy/confidentiality (the more places it is spread the more you are exposed to risks of hacking or insiders at any of the companies). There is no right answer but it depends on the person and the content.

I think you greatly reduce your risk by spreading it around. There cases where people have had a single Google or Apple account compromised and lost everything. That wouldn't have happened if their stuff had been distributed... though you'd still be in trouble with an email account hack, because of password resets and passwords sent in plain text emails.

Re: Gmail was down

#442

Post by axx »

TrainedMonkey wrote: post #282
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.

The intensity and speed this thread rose up on HN illustrates a very important principle. People are more likely to leave a review/comment/upvote if something is not working for them. Understanding that is useful when comparing products using reviews.

True, everytime we change something on our product, only the people that have something to complain about, say something.

Every productguy/developer should know this. :)

Re: Gmail was down

#443

Post by TeMPOraL »

ssully wrote: post #350
latj wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It makes me feel uneasy how reliant on Google I have become and basically everyone else I know.

If you take a look at your life as see everything else you are reliant on then you might have a full blown panic attack.

I did once, and it scared the hell out of me and made me worry for months. Then I finally got over it, and now I love when someone asks me, what would I do without my computer if the electric grid suddenly went out worldwide - I can go on talking how I'd have bigger worries than my computer, because "you, me and everyone we know would literally die within a week, followed by a significant part (30-50%) of world population".

Re: Gmail was down

#444

Post by TeMPOraL »

josephlord wrote: post #419
scholia wrote: post #413

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's very risky to put all your eggs in one basket. Why not spread stuff around?

There is a trade off between availability (spread it around) and privacy/confidentiality (the more places it is spread the more you are exposed to risks of hacking or insiders at any of the companies). There is no right answer but it depends on the person and the content.

There's also a tradeoff between availability and the fact that many of Google services are simply an order of magnitude better (both in terms of functionality and user experience) than anything else out there. I happily use DropBox instead of GDrive for syncing files, but I'm yet to see an acceptable replacement for GMail.

Re: Gmail was down

#445

Post by scholia »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #444
josephlord wrote: post #419

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a trade off between availability (spread it around) and privacy/confidentiality (the more places it is spread the more you are exposed to risks of hacking or insiders at any of the companies). There is no right answer but it depends on the person and the content.

There's also a tradeoff between availability and the fact that many of Google services are simply an order of magnitude better (both in terms of functionality and user experience) than anything else out there. I happily use DropBox instead of GDrive for syncing files, but I'm yet to see an acceptable replacement for GMail.

Outlook.com is an acceptable replacement for Gmail. Have you tried it recently?

Most comparative reviews find Gmail slightly better, but there's very little in it.

http://www.maximumpc.com/best_email_service_2013 http://mashable.com/2012/08/14/outlook-vs-gmail/ http://www.pcworld.com/article/2010598/gmail-vs-outlook-com-... http://lifehacker.com/5931621/outlook-vs-gmail-a-feature+by+...

Re: Gmail was down

#446

Post by scholia »

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…

Outlook.com is an alternative and it is the calibre of Gmail. The differences are marginal. See my comment above https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7120745

I use Outlook.com as a backup to Gmail and I use Gmail with my own domain name. I haven't switched, but it wouldn't be a problem if I had to.

Re: Gmail was down

#447

Post by spoiler »

I don't understand how throughout the whole time Gmail was down, it worked for a coworker and me the whole time, but it didn't work for anyone else. We enemy exchanged half a dozen emails to test it!

Could it be that the Web app was down, but the actual mail servers weren't? I know I have the Gmail extension in Chrome Installed (not sure about my coworker), could this be the reason?

Re: Gmail was down

#448

Post by scholia »

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…

Gmail spam filtering is actually poor, in my experience, because it's so aggressive. Around 30-40% of the mail in my spam folder is legitimate email, and the ratio is sometimes 90%. It would be even worse if I didn't have filters to tag some mail. (Gmail gives you the message it was not sent to spam because filter.)

Outlook.com's spam filtering is at least as good as Gmail's now, probably better. The only significant difference is that it's much less aggressive. Outlook.com will let two or three spams through where Gmail will put four or five legitimate emails in the spam box.

Since most people probably don't check their Gmail spam boxes regularly, Gmail's spam blocking is actually more dangerous.

Re: Gmail was down

#449

Post by scholia »

stevewilhelm wrote: post #264
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…

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.

Probably not as much effort as you think.... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7119301

Re: Gmail was down

#450

Post by Teckla »

scholia wrote: post #445
TeMPOraL wrote: post #444

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's also a tradeoff between availability and the fact that many of Google services are simply an order of magnitude better (both in terms of functionality and user experience) than anything else out there. I happily use DropBox instead of GDrive for syncing files, but I'm yet to see an acceptable replacement for GMail.

Outlook.com is an acceptable replacement for Gmail. Have you tried it recently? Most comparative reviews find Gmail slightly better, but there's very little in it. http://www.maximumpc.com/best_email_service_2013 http://mashable.com/2012/08/14/outlook-vs-gmail/ http://www.pcworld.com/article/2010598/gmail-vs-outlook-com-... http://lifehacker.com/5931621/outlook-vs-gmail-a-feature+by+...

Outlook.com is an acceptable replacement for Gmail.

It's not.

I've tried for days to login to Outlook.com, and verification text messages aren't coming through.

I finally had to start the email recovery procedure, which requires a mandatory 30 day waiting period. Sigh.

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