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Gmail was down

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Re: Gmail was down

#451

Post by 001sky »

abrahamsen wrote: post #436
IgorPartola wrote: post #327

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…

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…

This just leads to survivorship bias. Its a shitty hack. A good review systems needs to encourage honesty, not discretion (selective revelation). The substitution of selective revelation for "honesty" is not a more honest or more reliable system. This is a common mistake, and one that marketers like to promote. As it works to their advantage: to manipulate the selection and revelation process, it helps to have a system in place such as the one you describe.

Re: Gmail was down

#452

Post by flippyhead »

Zancarius wrote: post #397
flippyhead wrote: post #384

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think half the reason people upvote stories about big important sites like gmail being down is because it makes them feel better about any downtime their own sites have had.

I must be terribly naive or hopelessly optimistic. The immediate reason I thought of that would explain why stories like this are upvoted is for a matter of visibility, and in a distant second place, to head off questions like "Is it broken for you, too?" Judging by a cursory review of the comment here, I suspect that reasoning is fairly common. It strikes me as awfully pessimistic to immediately assume someone's cli…

I'm sure it's a mix of reasons. Like I said, my guess is half. Also, it wan't an immediate assumption, I've thought about it for a long time. Lastly, I've not suggested people are glad gmail is down or that people are harmed. That hadn't occurred to me; but now that you mention it, you're right, it probably does happen occasionally.

Re: Gmail was down

#453

Post by bwillard »

chmars wrote: post #187
sp332 wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your whole account or just the email part? If you have a real email client, you could rescue your email from it even if your account is toast. If just the webmail part goes down permanently, you can download your mailbox from https://www.google.com/settings/takeout

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.

Re: Gmail was down

#454

Post by jonknee »

vacri wrote: post #400
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.

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 :).

Re: Gmail was down

#455

Post by blisterpeanuts »

scholia wrote: post #412
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.

Simple solution: get an Outlook.com account and get it to collect all your Gmail. Use Gmail forwarding to forward all incoming emails to your Outlook.com account, and bcc copies of outgoing mail. You now have an off-site backup. Install a desktop client and download all your Gmail using IMAP. You now have an on-site backup, and you can use your client to send emails via Outlook.com. It's not hard. Anybody could do th…

Gmail is just a front end for my domain name and web hosting provider's mail services. I can usually use SquirrelMail to read/respond if for some reason gmail is unreachable.

I also like that I have the option to easily switch to another front end if gmail gets too annoying or NSA-snoopy.

Re: Gmail was down

#456

Post by blisterpeanuts »

yarone wrote: post #280
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.

I pay backupify.com $5 per month to backup my gmail, gcal, gdocs, etc.

Hm, $60 a year... that would buy you a 500 gig or 1 Tb external drive every year. Google now provides a backup feature so you could download your gmail/contacts/etc as one giant zip, then rsync it off to a couple of external drives and you have one less middleman to worry about leaking your data or going out of business and losing your backups.

Re: Gmail was down

#457

Post by abrahamsen »

001sky wrote: post #451
abrahamsen wrote: post #436

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This just leads to survivorship bias. Its a shitty hack. A good review systems needs to encourage honesty, not discretion (selective revelation). The substitution of selective revelation for "honesty" is not a more honest or more reliable system. This is a common mistake, and one that marketers like to promote. As it works to their advantage: to manipulate the selection and revelation process, it helps to have a syst…

I don't understand a word you are saying.

Re: Gmail was down

#458

Post by TeMPOraL »

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+...

I haven't; I'll check it out, out of curiosity.

Re: Gmail was down

#459

Post by 001sky »

abrahamsen wrote: post #457
001sky wrote: post #451

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This just leads to survivorship bias. Its a shitty hack. A good review systems needs to encourage honesty, not discretion (selective revelation). The substitution of selective revelation for "honesty" is not a more honest or more reliable system. This is a common mistake, and one that marketers like to promote. As it works to their advantage: to manipulate the selection and revelation process, it helps to have a syst…

I don't understand a word you are saying.

Aparently.

Re: Gmail was down

#460

Post by TrainedMonkey »

001sky wrote: post #451
abrahamsen wrote: post #436

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This just leads to survivorship bias. Its a shitty hack. A good review systems needs to encourage honesty, not discretion (selective revelation). The substitution of selective revelation for "honesty" is not a more honest or more reliable system. This is a common mistake, and one that marketers like to promote. As it works to their advantage: to manipulate the selection and revelation process, it helps to have a syst…

I think while that is one benefit of their move, it was not primary purpose. Google is data. They had different users on different services, now they are trying for unified account (Which is probably going to be G+ with everything else attached to it). In essence that is to allow people "convenient" access to all Google services with a single login. However, really it is to tie real people to their services (Easier to sell shit to real people) and to chain them to using Google.

I know there are lots of other reasons, but I believe what I stated above to be main reasons that outline Google's long term strategic plan. Keep driving ad click through rates up by showing more and more custom ads to everyone.

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