Google's email service goes down Google's Gmail has once again plummeted out of the cloud and the company is scurrying to fix the problem nearly an hour after it went titsup. The email service hit the buffers at around 10:15am GMT, and, at time of writing, it hasn't flickered back to life yet. All of which spells bad news for all those firms out there that …
Just what kind of free service are the offering here?
Isn't it enough that we let them pimp, sorry, of course I meant analyse, our usage data in return.
I did wonder why my inbox was surprisingly empty at 7-45 this morning. I suspect they started having problems way before 10-15.
I don't suppose we should complain about a freebee service. Some time back, most of us wouldn't have an email address without some college or business providing it. Currently we get a basic email service from our ISP, which can also go down on occasions. The only other solution is to host your own email server in some server farm. What would it cost to set up and service, assuming most people wouldn't be technically inclined to roll their own?
Ditch Exchange and Outlook (no matter how crappy they may be) for something that is little better than Hotmail?
This, of course, ignores that fact that company email is even less secure and less private than it was before.
What kinds of companies are we talking about? Proper ones or just mom and pop cottage industries?
Is it free? I pay for mine. Dont forget there are several aspects to gmail.
You have GAPE Standard and Premier then the bog standard Gmail offering.
A lot of companies moving to Google instead of other hosted options. They are going to be the ones worried by these events.
POP3 and IMAP work fine.
I dont think a small mess like this would convince anybody who has been weened of exchange to go back to it. Google Apps dying once a year is a lot nicer than exchange dying because:
The logs are full,
The database is full and now needs to be defragged for 2 days,
Exchange DoSed itself by duplicating messages in its own que,
etc,
etc.
Yep I remember the days when I had fix these sorry ass problems. Now with the miracle of google apps some other poor sod has to fix them and nobody has to pay a penny!
We're aware of a problem with Gmail affecting a small subset of users.
The affected users are unable to access Gmail. We will provide an
update by February 24, 2009 6:30 AM PST detailing when we expect to
resolve the problem. Please note that this resolution time is an
estimate and may change
Posted by Gmail Guide Yellow at 10:46am
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/10/what-we-learned-from-1-million.html
"Looking just at the unplanned outages that catch IT staffs by surprise, these results suggest Gmail is twice as reliable as a Novell GroupWise solution, and four times more reliable than a Microsoft Exchange-based solution that companies must maintain themselves."
Funny I still have access to my Novell GroupWise account today and so do the X number of clients we support on their own systems and less downtime then GMail in the last 12 months by the sound of it!
Figures and stats are fun :)
Some people have been getting intermittent service via Imap (like me!) and it's fine for others.
Some have been getting the basic HTML site to work (i've not got ot to work!)
Pain in the neck! was gonna clear out 3k worth of junk emails today!
paris... 'cause when she goes down it's fun!
Some prankster sent a link to a Google search to a friend, who then clicked it. It was at this point that GMail servers gound to a halt at the quantity of data being pushed at them by Google. Link in full below:
*DO NOT CLICK!*
http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=google
*DO NOT CLICK!*
It was kind of subtle but did anyone else get the impression that the author of the article is not a fan of Google or Gmail?
We switched to Gmail for our domain about a half year ago after finally getting fed up with our web host's numerous problems. The web host themselves were aware they sucked at email and added a simple way to switch to Gmail within their control panel. Other than a few false positives arriving in the spam folder we've been very pleased with Gmail. We use POP3 rather than the web interface so maybe that has helped.
Also, Exchange was never an option for us. For a company with < 10 people and no dedicated IT staff it would be suicide to rely on something so complicated. Plus the dynamic IP address makes things difficult.
When it popped back into existence, I had Ads displayed for the 1st time in a few years (use CustomizeGoogle Add-On in Firefox), which was a bit strange - they have now gone again \0/.
And then I noticed that new mail, is not bolding the sender's name anymore - the subject still is - (or it looks like a different font at lest).. so maybe they updated the web code and it all went a bit ... Pete Tong?
Buyz'n'grrlz, just a few things to note:
1 it's _free_. If those who complain were actually paying for the service, they'd have some grounds for that complaint, but it's _free_. If you don't like the service, find another one and use that.
2 the IMAP and POP services worked without a problem, or at least without a problem that was detected here. Those who use a real email client didn't even notice that there was a problem until they saw that some wusses were complaining about a free service.
3 Goggle Central is in Deepest Kalifornia. If it broke at 10:15 GMT, that's 02:15 their time. Odds are excellent that the first team is asleep, and it'd take a while for whichever poor saps are on the night watch to either fix the problem or realise that they can't fix it and call in the first team.
4 When I first read the article about half an hour ago, 07:30 EST, or 12:30 GMT, the problem had been fixed, or at least Google's webmail service was working around here. This means that the outage was around 2 hours 15 minutes at most. Panicking and bitching and moaning about a two hour outage from a _free_ service strikes me as being... juvenile.
I suspect the problems started earlier. but things are working now.
Email systems go down all the time. What's the big deal? It takes time to fix things. This one, it seems, was Google's job to fix, rather than a broken Internet. I see a prompt response, maybe some reason to improve communication,and nothing extraordinary.
Didn't mirror to a local imap server you say?
Idiot I say
Actually I suspect if you look at down-time per user and compare it to most in-house solutions its probably doing pretty well.
Has no-one noticed that if you install the imap package on linux or solaris it works for all local users without any further configuration at all? I'm not sure about the rest but suse will pull email off a remote imap/pop3 server for local users with a couple of tick-boxes and the account details, so no inbound smtp to worry about.
Even if you do rely on gmail and must have the web interface, is two hours without email really a huge problem? I certainly wouldn't be looking at Exchange as an alternative.
Airplanes don't fall out the sky, Batteries don't burst into flames, Cars don't crash, Digital TV doesn't go dead, Electricity never stops flowing, File servers never forget, Gas never leaks, Houses never subside, Ink never stains, Jump-jets always jump, never flip, Kippers never taste off, Lemmings never fall over cliffs, Mancunians are always friendly, NASA satellites work first time, Optimus Prime will not fail to appear when needed, Portaloos are never full to the brim, Questions are always answered, Realestate is never a bad investment, Shit never happens, Trains stay on their rails Users are never wrong, VP's never bugger off with the company's loot, Windows just works, X-terminals don't need complex configuration, Youths never fail to respect their elders, and Zeppelins never ignite.
That's why people expect Google to be perfect.
Really?
1 - the logs are full - never heard of backing up the databases to flush the logs?
2 - the database is full - are you kidding me? You didn't spot this in advance / increase it's size etc etc. 2003 SP2 came out a long time ago / problem doesn't exist in 2007 / never existed in Enterprise
3 - Exchange DOSed itself - given points 1 and 2 I'm not sure you are qualified to make this statement which is actually pure fantasy - it just started duplicating messages itself did it?
It's people like you who bang on about Exchange being crap without actually having the first clue about it, and probably cause more problems than the software ever did because you can't look after it.
Its been working fine on my G1 all day through both my phone tied account and my other ones which I access using the generic Android Email program, and, as many others have reported the POP/IMAP/SMTP part seems to have been working fine so it really only seems to have been the web front end that has been broken.
> Google's IMAP servers still seems to be working. If you don't want to configure an email client then you can log on via http://www.[FRICKEN' BALEETED]
NICE WAY TO GET PHISHED, IDIOT.
DO. NOT. GIVE. OUT. YOUR. PASSWORD. EVER.
*takes calm pill*
Look, even if those people are genuine, the whole idea of typing your friggin' ISP PASSWORD into some random stranger's third-party site on the web is criminally irresponsible and should not be done by anyone ever. It's f'ing stupid when Facebook suggests you give it your webmail account password so it can look up your contacts for you, but it's even more f'ing stupid to put yourself to all that risk JUST IN ORDER TO USE A WEBMAIL INTERFACE TO ACCESS SOMETHING THAT'S ALREADY WEBMAIL IN THE FIRST PLACE. FFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFUUUUUUUUUU >rage<
<goes off to bang head against wall>
WHEN *bang* WILL *bang* PEOPLE *bang* GET *bang* SECURITY?
*bang* *bang* *bang*
I have 3 gmail accounts, one accessed only by the web Interface, one thats on POP 3 and one thats on IMAP, when I realised there was an issue I checked them all and found that none were working.
Imap came back first, followed by POP 3 then the web page.
So at one point it was all down.
(And yes I did check connectivity was ok)
"I dont think a small mess like this would convince anybody who has been weened of exchange to go back to it"
Yeah... right...
And if you're the IT Director responsible for moving to the "cloud" and then this happens how do you think you would feel when the CEO comes to you and says "what are you doing about fixing the company-wide email outage" and you have to reply "err... there's nothing we can do about it."
Do me a favour.
(Paris because she knows what to do when things go down)
I'd wager it was the spammers again--but Google can't be bothered to fight them seriously, eh?
http://groups.google.com/group/gmail-labs-suggest-a-labs-feature/browse_frm/thread/d9e225b090633288/c9abda815a1d506f?lnk=gst&q=shanen+spam#c9abda815a1d506f
(Isn't spam the #1 problem with email?)
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