The Day Gmail Stood Still: A Tale of Horror

NT

For some strange reason, I'm reminded of the line from one of the French soldiers in Monty Python and the Holy Grail:

"You don't frighten us, English pig dogs. Go and boil your bottoms, you sons of a silly person. I blow my nose at you, so-called 'Arthur King,' you and all your silly English K-nig-hts. "

Well, let me offer the other side of it.

I chose a blackberry because of ease of use...Yeah, proprietary I know...but I don't have time to fool with stuff that kinda works...and I honestly didn't have time to learn something new at the moment...I've got some other excuses lying around...I just cannot find them.

One of the reasons I chose the blackberry was because of the absolutely great Gmail App that installs free in about 3 seconds.

That was a bad day for us...out in the field with a new volunteer in Temple Texas with only a laptop, no cell and the family he was installing for had no phone at all. Stuff went wrong, and it chose to go wrong within that two hour period. He ran into dual boot issues and thought he had cratered their Windows Partition. 504 errors ensued on my end when he tried to email me via his aircard.

So...we are syncing with Yahoo (yuk) and getting a straight forward to my email box there...stinks but the gold-platted trust I had in Gmail corroded badly with these last two outages.

h

I did notice one outage but missed the second one Helios mentioned. (Hey, Ken, I hope you're recovering well.) Any service is going to have down time now and again. Yahoo has had outages too. Even running your own mail server is no guarantee of anything since the hardware can fail or the ISP/NSP can have an outage.

And Yahoo has had several intermittent outages recently, in the form of "Cannot connect" errors on their web interface. Sometimes they resolve within a few seconds, and sometimes within a few minutes.

(I haven't had the chance to examine their POP3 service during such outages.)

@gus3: There was one a few weeks ago that took about two hours to resolve. It happens. Overall I still think Google and Yahoo! Mail provide a decent if imperfect service.

> Overall I still think Google and Yahoo! Mail provide a decent if imperfect service.

Agreed. Though I've noticed intermittent errors on Google Finance lately also. They're obviously having issues of some kind. I also failed to notice the two hour outage.

Given the price of Google Apps and GMail, you get a remarkable service for what you pay. Even if you pay the premium route on Google, it's only $50 a year per user. Everyone should get their own domain for that money! :)

Looking at it another way, while two hours is a long time (not really, IMO) for email to go down, getting a system that massive back up in only two hours is impressive, regardless of what the problem was.

And I have to agree with helios, Blackberries are great. I use two, a personal (Curve 8330) and a work (Tour 9630) both on Verizon, and I am thrilled with them. Would be better if they weren't proprietary, of course, but they are rock solid phones, both very high quality builds. The Tour easily...EASILY...blows away any QWERTY phone I have tried from any carrier, and typing quickly and accurately is a snap.