Gmail was down (opens in new tab)

Edit: Personal @gmail, and also Apps for Business.

It seems it was worldwide.

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.

But I learned to own my data where it matters and not sweat the rest ages ago. (Stopped compulsively "hoarding")

While Gmail was down I couldn't view or edit documents in Drive.

And I also lost control of my Google Compute Engine instances, apparently since the gcutil application couldn't authenticate with my Google account.

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 this.

And please note that Gmail is not free for everyone, there are many Google Apps users.

All in I'd probably let it go for a couple hundred bucks.

Joking aside: what happens when companies that are sitting on huge chunks of extremely private data change owners and the new owners are unburdened by conscience?

They called customer service and were informed that Google has no obligation to be dependable since it's a free service.

- The search is very good, even searches within attachments.

- You can have large attachments.

- Doesn't run out of space and is free.

- Spam detection is flawless. I've rarely had anything important fall into spam. Alternatives like spambayes are not nearly as good.

- The threading is excellent. Most competing products suck at this.

- The keyboard shortcuts are comprehensive and save me tons of time. Most competing products suck at this.

- Labels and filters are super powerful and save me tons of time. Most competing products suck at this.

I don't like any of the non-webmail alternatives, simply because they are not webmail, and you can't get to them from everywhere.

Alternatives seem to be:

- http://roundcube.net/

- https://www.mailpile.is/

- http://www.horde.org/

- http://openwebmail.org/ (pretty bad)

- http://squirrelmail.org/ (also pretty terrible)

edit:

Looks like mailpile is closest to what I want, with a open source and modern python stack, super clean and simple UI, focus on the right features. But it's fairly alpha. On the other hand, they seem to have gotten some 160k of crowdfunding, so the main developers seem dedicated.

Fastmail also seems to be the best non-open alternative around, imho.

edit2:

Somewhat disappointed that mailpile seems to have reinvented the wheel multiple times by not using an existing web framework / search server.

It's not the interface that's hard to replicate, in other words; it's the backend, the service component. This is pretty consistent with the type of "moats" Google has generally built around its properties, they're almost always more about magic on the backend than magic on the front.

  Why is there no alternative webmail of the 
  caliber of gmail? Is it a difficult problem? 

There are a handful of alternatives each with their own pros and cons but the key problem is lock in, psychological or technological.

Even if Gmail were down for an hour every day, I'd have to think and work hard to migrate away due to (over)-relying on their service and some of the unique features it has.

Edit: plus, no Google-snooping of course.

I just want to be able to run an email server that has conversation features, contacts, XMPP chat, etc, but isn't Microsoft Exchange

Disclosure: I work for Microsoft (not outlook.com team though).

Spam filtering works well too.

Understanding that is useful when comparing products using reviews.

Everyone burst into laughter. They had been talking about it for minutes.

Usually you would expect "not reachable" or something similar. It is like server is returning error msg to client that service is down.

Temporary Error (500)

We’re sorry, but your Gmail account is temporarily unavailable. We apologize for the inconvenience and suggest trying again in a few minutes. You can view the Apps Status Dashboard for the current status of the service.

Hide Detailed Technical Info Numeric Code: 93

I suppose that the logic is "hey, I wonder if it's just us... surely someone on HN will complain the instant that things go south, better check there first."

Checking twitter never occurs to me...

For example, when there were coinbase issues, people wouldn't get responses for weeks. However, once a post about the delays hit the front page, the founders finally responded.

So no, I'm not surprised this happened and I wouldn't be surprised to see a swift response

Would have to have some statistics to back up that "about us" though, right?

Although I have some gmail accounts for various purposes main mail is actually non gmail. I just happened to browse by and see the link. The question is why did I care to click through? I guess because I was curious what others would say about this or what they knew about it. Not that it mattered to me since as I said it's not my main email source. So what we have is really the same curiosity of when there is a car crash and you end up with a "gaper" delay.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rRqKYXcL-2U

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7116971

http://i.imgur.com/wDL6MzX.png

FB is down almost 4%, AAPL is down almost 2%, TSLA is down almost 4%, AMZN is down almost 3%, the whole S&P 500 is down ~2%. I'm pretty sure the market doesn't think that an Apps outage threatens all those companies (and the whole S&P 500) to the point that they'd shave whole points off all of their market values.

Then again, maybe everything I said goes out the window when things are at this magnitude.