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Gmail was down

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461–470 of 476 posts

Re: Gmail was down

#462
post #400

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I got this error while trying to do a manual backup of a company mailbox :) One day I'll have the time to write that script manually

Just use IMAP or POP, there's no need for a custom script. Email backs itself up :).

If you have the password. If you're backing up user mailboxes, you don't have their password.

Re: Gmail was down

#464
post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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...

  > For a time, Target used Amazon's website code.
I remember getting the email saying that we no longer had to special case Target stuff in the retail platform. 'Twas a joyous day all around.

Re: Gmail was down

#465
post #128

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.

I took off my headphones and asked the office: "anyone else having gmail issues?" Everyone burst into laughter. They had been talking about it for minutes.

[deleted]

Re: Gmail was down

#466

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…

Look, if you're looking for an alternative, you might as well go as simple as possible. Otherwise, you're never going to get unhooked from the behemoths of today.

Re: Gmail was down

#467

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.

> People are more likely to leave a review/comment/upvote if something is not working for them.

Also known as the 3/11 rule. On average people tell 3 others when they have had positive experience. And on average they tell 11 others when they have a negative experience. [proper citation appreciated]

Add the effect of internet, and multiply by Google effect. More recent posts are given higher relevance, and of course more frequent occurrences are given higher relevance.

News agencies and publishers have known this for ages - after all, there's no news like bad news.

Re: Gmail was down

#468

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

That sounds like an unusual experience. I just checked through a few days of my spam folder and didn't find a single legitimate email.

Re: Gmail was down

#469
post #468

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

That sounds like an unusual experience. I just checked through a few days of my spam folder and didn't find a single legitimate email.

That sounds like an unusual experience ;-)

To be fair, I get a lot of press releases, newsletters and bulk mailings. But there's really no excuse for Gmail to keep putting emails from, say, EE Press Office in spam when I take them out every time. (My account was an early beta.)

Re: Gmail was down

#470
post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Creating the archive takes some time and is it working during a Gmail outage anyway? For OS X users, CloudPull (payware) is a good solution for a continuous Gmail backup. It's developed by Golden Hill Software: http://www.goldenhillsoftware.com/

No Takeout was affected by the outage as well unfortunately.

Thanks, good to know!
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