I noticed gmail was not working and on a whim searched the news for “gmail down.” It seems I am afflicted by the same temporary service interruption that others have been seeing. Things were working fine until about 10 minutes ago.
I consider myself a gmail power user and recently chose to upgrade my account with a $20 / year payment for 10 gigs of additional storage. I route a number of accounts to my primary gmail account and use it throughougt the day, almost every day. So it was a no-brainer to pour some money into more cloud storage. However, it is worth noting: paid or unpaid my account went down like the rest.
Since it is 1:30am, I’m not really upset about the outage–but article linked above does point out the important idea of forwarding copies of all mail you receive from gmail to a second, different cloud storage provider.
I shudder at the idea of using Yahoo or Hotmail even as a backup. Simply seeing these domains in people’s primary email addresses gathers up some initial judgment about the person’s basic computer saviness.
Email is like electric power. You expect it to be cheap and ubiquotous. For the rare times that there is a brownout in your neighborhood, it does make sense to look at having a full backup of mail destined for your gmail on a different service provider.
I just checked and gmail is working again for me. Back to it. I’ll spend some more time thinking about a backup cloud for my gmails.
ubiquitous?