How much do you depend on Gmail?
Where were you when Gmail went out?
Last Tuesday's "Gfail" only shows how dependent we’ve become of “cloud services” like Gmail and others on our daily productivity tasks. Many companies these days use Gmail for their corporate email, and were left in the cold for more than 2 hours.
Of course for most of the US this wasn’t a problem, since the outage happened during their sleeping time. For me it wasn’t a problem either. Estonia was celebrating their independence day, so it was a day off and I went for a small road trip.
But to me it really is a matter of not relying on Gmail as much as I used to. I already ran into problems when I exceeded their “huge storage capacity” So, I’m taking a few steps to ensure that even if Gmail fails again, I’ll still have access to my emails.
Step one is opening and starting to use a back up account at Yahoo!, step 2 is installing Google Gears on my laptop so that even if I’m offline I can at least use my email to search my most used email. This is specially useful when flying and when your Gmail goes offline and you need to search for a booking code for your next trip… Step 3 is making sure that somewhere I have an IMAP enabled account that downloads all my email once a week or so.
Until recently I’ve always used Thunderbird, or Apple’s Mail, but now I’ve found a better alternative. Post-box It’s sleek, clean, based on Thunderbird, does search much better than any other (perhaps on par with Apple’s Mail) and works on both Windows and Mac.
Next time this happens… I’ll be ready. Will you?