You do know, they have business accounts that go thru the Gmail servers that are $50 a head per year? Those would not be Free.

I know, but which email service never failed? Even more, which online service never failed? Even the biggest corporations had downtimes larger than that with hundreds of employees dedicated to email systems...
And you want to pay $4/month with no downtimes? Please be realist...

Google Apps Premier offers a 99.9% SLA, which means just under 9 hours of downtime a year.

Again, I'd be fine with that 9 hours if they were after business hours for my timezone, with 1-2 weeks notice, for maintenance.

This is what my business ISP does for our fiber, and the downtime averages to less than a minute each time.

But a 2 hour downtime for business level e-mail isn't acceptable, even with the SLA, and any serious business would consider another service. Can you imagine a law firm with billable hours in the hundreds of hours not able to fill quota because of this toying around?

You get what you [don't] pay for.

Well my domain (http://www.gislanka.com is hosted by Google apps for your domain and I have serious issues that front or startup page won't load from Sri lanka most of the time. I have been facing this problem and does any one else have similar issues? please share it. Thanks in advance.

I don't know. I tested Google Apps Premier and found it fairly amateur, and abandoned the effort. One million businesses, some of them fairly significant, depend on this service is truly shocking to me. Power searches sometimes I'd be sitting there for 30 seconds waiting for a response. Google has put zero effort into anything beyond gmail and calendar. Google sites, video, spreadsheet, presentation are all complete jokes in terms of even basic functionality compared to applications a decade ago. And the speed? wow, just timeout after timeout after timeout!

It is on the news because gmail does not usually fail. For a moment, think about hotmail... It fails so many times, so often that it would be boring to publish it. Even when it is online you may loose mail, or receive loads of spam for no reason.
Gmail is the best mail service for me, even going down for two hours it is better than the competence. Gmail forced the rest to improve. Who gave you gbs of storage for your mails first and for free?, Do you remember chotmail/yahoo with 2mb? Come on!

I gotta agree that G-Mail is leaps and bounds ahead of yahoo and hotmail. IMO their interface is better and it loads faster. Also they offer more services for free like forwarding and POP/IMAP.

Everyone

Get the fuk over it. Its not like the world is over because gmail was down for 2 hours. s*** happens always in IT. I know I work in the industry. Name 1 company out that who offers a free service to people that is 100% perfect! And I am sure all the google haters out there are just loving this so they can start their bashing about the company. I happen to like google and all of their services. I have stopped using my hotmail, and yahoo e-mail accounts for 5 years now ever since gmail was in beta stages. So being down for 2 hours is nothing. For crying out loud get out and get laid for a couple of hours rather than sitting by your computer waiting for "important" e-mails.

My Yahoo email account is always clogged with spam and a bunch of false positives. At least I usually don't have to label email as spam with Gmail; it's usually already in the Spam folder anyways. YMMV indeed.

MJ: "My Yahoo mail has *never* been down since I got it 7 years ago"

Well, not that you've noticed, anyway...

http://www.google.com/se...mp;aq=f&oq=&aqi=

That was a major issue, because I had important emails to attend to you and I was waiting for a important response. So this should be a big issue, and Google should know that we rely on them and they better keep their services up and running and better than the other competitors or I know that they will loose one person...Besides, they are slowly climbing to the top, Yahoo Mail, is one of the main email services used.....I prefer Gmail anyday over any other service, but it should not have lasted for 2 hours....for heavens sake...

"I have never met anyone that uses gmail "

roflmfao!

Funniest thing I've ever heard. So...what's the deal? Hanging solely with a close-knit group of conspiracy theorists, or just don't get out much?

you sir are an idiot.

every single person i know online(over 100people) has a gmail account and only one of them is a spamer, and then only spaming people that piss him off.

Then enlighten us oh wise one with what is the best free e-mail account service out there??? I would love to hear this.

How would you know if they use Gmail or not? I use Gmail and I do not spam (despite jokes to the contrary). If you have all emails from Gmail accounts blocked, then you are broadcasting that you are clueless. This might seem odd to you but some business also use Gmail, just like some use Yahoo Mail or Hotmail.

I, like anyone with a dime to their name, uses their own domain and servers for email.

None of the people I know are poor enough to have to use crappy free email accounts. Before you go on about traveling or whatever, it's called a laptop.

"It is used by spammers more than anyone else"

Source? No? Imagine that...

"I, like anyone with a dime to their name, uses their own domain and servers for email."

ROFLMAO!! Too funny. Anyone, huh? Sorry, you account for *maybe* .001% of the population there, sparky. Get some perspective.

I have my own domain, and even my own sites, email, etc... But I still don't fool myself into believe that is the solution for everyone....or even me. I still have multiple Google Mail accounts.

Damn just to a search on gmail blacklisted. You are retarded!

*laughing*

What a joke. You *are* kidding, right? Name a non-"personal" server that *hasn't* been blacklisted. Hell, our corporate server has been blacklisted by a few companies on occasion. For that matter, so has my personal domain. It happens.

So you have no backup to your claim that Google Mail is used more by spammers than legit users other than "It's been blacklisted! ZOMG!".

No, I guess you're probably *not* kidding. You are, in fact, the joke itself. :)

Using your argument, where is your proof that it isn't used predominantly by spammers? When I blocked gmail last month from our servers, we had never received one legit email from a gmail account. 100,000s of spam, but not one that was from a real person to a real person.

"Using your argument, where is your proof that it isn't used predominantly by spammers?"

You are the one that made the claim, genius. *YOU* back it up.

"When I blocked gmail last month from our servers, we had never received one legit email from a gmail account. 100,000s of spam, but not one that was from a real person to a real person."

While I don't doubt it's possible, I do not believe for one second that this represents anything *near* the norm. I know many people who use Google Mail and we receive hundreds of valid emails from Google Mail users every week. do I think my situations is the norm? No, in fact, I am dead-certain it lies somewhere in between the two.

Look, I am the first person to admit I am a fan of Google. I will also be one of the first to warn against using Google Mail for anything *but* personal communication. Anything above or beyond that and you are asking for trouble.

My main issue with your original comment is the absurd "I know no-one who uses it" and "it's used by more spammers than legitimate users". Both are BS. One I can prove because you at least "act" liek you "know" me. I use it. The other is a claim *you* made that I figure is BS. If you want it to be treated as valid, back it up.

Gee, just like the old mainframe days, right down to the denial of problems by the data center guys.

When this happens, get off your backside or grab a good ole fashioned telephone to communicate.

"*Still transferring that 9 MB file via clicks and gulps.*"

I've heard of people who could actually "connect" with a 14.4k modem. Doubt they could "transfer" anything useful beyond that point, but...would be interesting to watch. :p

I remember back when I bought my "Sportster" 14.4 baud modem and when I hooked it up, it made me feel like I was flying around the internet at the speed of light.

Also, FWIW, two Saturdays ago, we had a group of people all preparing to leave our apartment to drive to the church for my step-daughter's wedding; and that included the bride, her mother and the entire wedding party.

My wife tried to visit Google Maps to get driving directions for the four cars which were taking us all, when lo and behold, our ISP (Optimum) had completely crashed and we could not get online at all.

OH NOOOO !!! What a horrible inconvenience and outrage...at the worst possible moment too !! But then cooler heads prevailed as some of us who were old enough to remember Sportster modems also remembered the days before Google and, after a few simple phone calls, made on our (gasp) landline, we had our directions and were happily on our way.

And in the end it really didn't matter because no amount of Googling or gmail could have prevented the traffic jam at the bridge toll, so in the end we were late anyway.

Couldn't have said it better than myself. But who has an good ole fashioned telephone now a days. Its more like the good ole fashioned cell phone :) but I like your comment.

Certainly people have a right to complain since they're paying for this service...

pay...for....gmail.......ROFL.....ok......

What planet are you from dude!!!! You don't pay for Gmail its FREEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!

Note to all:

E-Mail is not a real-time communication service. Never was. Never will be under it's current design.

It sucks when it goes down. No doubt. But claiming a service should have 100% uptime when it is based on technology on which that ideal is *impossible* to achieve is beyond ignorant.

Email was invented in the 70's by researchers for ARPANET. Although email adoption has grown by orders of magnitude since then, it is essentially the *same system* that it was 30 years ago. A message does not simply go from my computer to yours, it is routed through dozens of other machines, all of which can fail at any given time. It was *never* designed to be used for critical, time-sensitive communications.

Don't forget people expect EVERYTHING to work 100% of the time. Anyone who's ever worked help desk know that probably better than most. If it goes down for a short while it's like the end of the world to them!

Not the point, MJ.

The mail server can have an uptime of decades and E-Mail will still be unreliable because it is not just *your* mail server involved.

My comment had little if anything to do with Google Mail going down and more to do with people's dependence on an unreliable service for critical communication. Regardless of the server you use.

While I can certainly understand frustration with an outage of service, no matter how small. Google has to be extremely embarrassed by this and I have no doubt this exact type of issue will never happen again.

Keep in mind though gmail was built, engineered and designed from the ground up, by google. Its unique and when something goes wrong, they have to figure it out. They don't call someone up for tech support or something.

Point is, the fact it works, and works extremely well is amazing. The person who wrote this talked about the outage a year ago. Not last week or last month, a year ago. And this was an issue taht was unique. When your redudnancy/fail over system fails, and it cascades.

I can't even imagine how huge their gmail infastructure is. This company hosts 36 million email accounts on 10's of thousands or more servers. Yeah thats amazing it works with almost no down time. 99.99 percent uptime is a little less then 1 hour per year. What do you think the average in house uptime is? Not that. I am sure a little slack would be appreciated, instead of the losing my mind you google is horrible for 100 minutes of outage attitude.

When you say" this type of issue" won't happen again, I say, "of course it will." They simply didn't plan for growth or the type of growth they saw. They will get burned by this again and again, it is what brought down their Gapps service 10+ times this year alone. It is what brought down AWS last year. These cloud vendors cannot predict the growth, the traffic patterns, the way in which these services will be used, period. And it will continually bring down their services as they get more complex and they get used in ways never imagined.

This service is free don't give me that "I'm subject to ads" malarkey - so you forfeit your right to complain. It's free. You always have the right to change services. There's lots of FREE email services out there so if you don't like this FREE service go sign up for another.

The service is not free for companies using those services, and also there are a lot of schools using this paid service as well.

This outage impacted them all too.

Why in the hell would a company pay good to host their e-mails when a company can host an in house mail server for much cheaper um like Exchange!!! Any school or company that uses gmail and "pays" for it is a freaking moron and the IT person that set it up for them should be fired and revoked from working in IT again.

""We feel your pain" seems to be a new recurring Google slogan. It's the same exact thing the company said one year ago when Gmail went down for 15 hours."

Nate - I don't know how old you are but it's not so long ago that email outage was an at least monthly event courtesy of your in-house IT department in companies large or small. Once a year for an unexpected 2h I can forgive easily without s***ting my pants on twitter.

It affected me, but it was a minor issue. I can survive 4 hours without email and it not have a major impact on my life.

For those who rely on email so much...stop. When it happens, just live life a little. If you can't, then email is just too important in your life. If it has to be important--e.g., you use gmail for your important business and it cost you money, QUIT USING GMAIL FOR YOUR BUSINESS.

Otherwise, as Yoda would say, "You must learn to let go of that which you are afraid to lose."

At no time can you ever expect a system to be up 100% of the time, even with back up systems it just doesn't exist. 98% and even 99% up time is realistic in the business world but 2 hours of down time out of a whole year is less that .001% down time in one calendar year.

Seriously how can anyone explain to me that less than one hundredth of a percent downtime in one year is anything more than a minor issue?

The fact that Google being down for a couple hours was so shocking and news worthy seems a pretty good indicator of just how reliable it actually is. One outage a year is many orders of magnitude better then any in-house managed solution *I've* ever dealt with.
But of course companies will have to weight the cost benefits to the potential risks when deciding to go with Web versions of software. It might not be a good enterprise solution for a massive company with the enormous resources available to have multiple site redundant systems stocked with up-to-date hardware and software with 24/7 on-site management. But for the other 99.999999% of the world, it's benefits will be very, very attractive if such apps are as reliable as Google's where a 2 hour outage is newsworthy rather then typical.

Google's services are not free. Here are some things you give up in exchange for "free e-mail"

1. Tracking for all Google sites and services, on by default. A complete and total profile is shaped for you whether you want it or not.
2. Advertising. Unless you block this, you are being advertised to. I tend to think of advertising as "mind-share." Instead of giving your money in return for goods or services, you are giving a share of your mind. If you typically enjoy having lies and nontruths fill your brain, this is the trade-off that makes it worth it to you.
3. Another attorney decides the fate of a subpoena for your data. Google's attorneys make a cost/benefit analysis based on Google's best interest, never yours. This may not be in your best interest in most cases. When you host your own mail/data, you at least have a tad bit more control over giving the data over.
4. Your data is not yours. Imagine you break Google's terms of Service, and they terminate your account. Your data is gone. Sure if you used Gears or backed up that data you have a copy, but you do not own that data that they have on their servers, they do. You are paying them with your data.

I do believe that people who use Google's free services probably are asking too much. We've all come to accept Google's pervasiveness in society, and I know a lot who have transitioned a lot of their resources to Google. Even so, folks seem to quickly forget that as massive as Google is, it's still a single entity that can, at any time, go south for any number of reasons. A lot of the griping I saw today on Twitter implied that because Google's services were free, the whole world was entitled to them. Frankly, if one isn't paying for the services, I don't feel he is justified in raising such a fuss. Leaning on a single company for so much of one's online life is never a good idea. Or to put it another way, don't store all of your eggs in Google's basket.

i would just like to point out that we have paid for there free services. i dont care how you think about it every single web site that you goto that lists a ADS by GOGGLE you have paid for it

with your eyes seeing there ads

unless you block every single one of them or dont browse the internet and have never seen a ad from them then you can truly say that there free

its called a hosts file, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hosts_file and yes, i block all ads, Google ads being the least annoying of the bunch, since they are mostly just text ads.

for a good hosts file manager/updater http://blocklistpro.com/...hosts-file-manager.html
to use on vista and newer you need to use compat mode to remove desktop composition or visual themes from the app, its easy as hell.

and even if u have to look at google ads, ur still getting the service free, since your not paying anything out of pocket for it.

Everyone has forgotten (or is too young/new to the Internet) that SMTP was never intended for real-time messaging. At best, it was meant to be slightly faster and less hassle than snail mail. We've become spoiled by 24x7 access to email. Give it a rest, people. If you need immediate communication, that's what instant messaging and VoIP are for.

As frustrating as it is when my gmail goes down I try not to forget that I am using a free service and that gmail is largely responsible for giving us such great features with free services (remember when hotmail accounts had a 2mb inbox!).

That said, I don't like the idea of web-based office suites and the like because they rely on the assumption that you always have a reliable broadband connection without stupid datacaps (I'm thinking of Telecom New Zealand as an example of bad ISP whose monopoly is still crippling NZ's telecommunications industry).

Free web-based email + locally installed apps is the best solution.

IMO, people have NO right b****ing about an OCCASIONAL outage on an otherwise bulletproof FREE mail service. You are getting their services FREE, whaty else can you get for free these days? lets see:
* a punch in the mouth
* a kick to the nads
* spit on
* stung repeatedly by a swarm of bees
* bit by a poisonous snake (in which you get TWO free things, the free bite AND, at no extra cost, the poison)
* bit by a dog

wow, nice list of other free things there. I know I would much rather have any of those than a free email address :)

The point of this post is, the mail is FREE dammit, get a life and stop whining that something you didnt pay for broke

"Users" have every right to complain when a service they use and rely on goes down. Please explain your reasoning on why they shouldn't be able to. Google "promotes", "targets" and "markets" GMail to business'. This separates them from other typical "free" services and puts them into a "non-payed for" services category.

Punches in the mouth, kicks to the nads, being spit upon, being stung by bees (note plural), being bit by a poisonous snake, being bit by a dog are also not free. One pays from the pain, the medical treatments, insurance deductibles, time off from work, gas money for the treatments, possible bus fares for the treatments, embarrassment etc.

If you disagree to these points. Hold still and don't complain while each of those effected punch you in the mouth, kicks you in the nads, spit in your face, sting you with a swarm of bees (note plural), bite you with a poisonous snake, bite you with a dog with rabies. Now remember, no complaining.

Oh and by the way. I say this nicely: you're a hypocrite for complaining about them. At least they had a reason do to a lack of service they use.

I could see your point if it were down a lot, but so far they have a better record than most places

Google has a horrible record. 3 nines, and that is just Gmail, Docs has been down 10+ times this year. (They remove history from apps status, that's awfully convenient.)

from previous thread.

"confused users...
whats to be confused about? its dead...
heres how the future is shaping up 'oh look, Google docs is down... well, must postpone my meetings, everyone you can go home (1hr later) sh*t, its back... FUUUUUU Google'
meanwhile i'll be enjoying Office 2010 and Office Live ease of use, something dies? no big deal everythings syncd

i'll never rely on the just 'the cloud' for important business ;P"

i won't rely on it, unless it is universally syncd with a mirrored installed App on my PC, which is why i really think Microsoft has the upper hand here or will very shortly, on the business and yes even personal use side of things

It's hardly that difficult, artfuldodga
Save all data locally, as well as the cloud. Now you have redundancy, and Local apps that can work on said files on the _rare_ time google services are inaccessible.

Good thing gmail isn't a COMMUNICATION MEDIUM also, so access to send/receive those files is UNIMPORTANT.

Office live isnt 100% free either :)

That is until Google Wave is released.

Odd how you make a point on these services being free then how they aren't. As predicted and stated earlier, hypocrite.

I have had no interuptions at all today using GMAIL, so far.

Are you using POP or IMAP? These aren't affected.

I have tried it all at different locations and have seen no problem with multiple accounts. I guess, I'm just lucky

Gmail is free, if you want 0 downtime (if that is even possible), pay for the damn service or host it yourself like giwo said.

kthx

Ehh, servers go down, even production servers. If something is mission critical, you can choose to host it yourself, that just means you'll have a face to vent your anger to when it goes down. A company can live without email for an hour or 2, that's what telephones are for.

what is this strange invention you speak of... the tele....phone?

At work our telephones go down more then Exchange does.