Gmail Without The Cloud: Tips For Next Time

gmail_outage_tips

Yesterday’s Gmail service outage is a hot topic on just about every news site right now. For so many of us that have always taken the reliability of Gmail for granted it was a real shock to lose all of the functionality of the web based system. Now that we’ve learned our lesson, here’s a couple of tips to help you out the next time there’s an outage.

Setup POP and IMAP access now

Your Gmail can be sent and retrieved via IMAP or POP. These protocols were still working through the outage yesterday but unfortunately you need to use the web interface to enable them. Even if you are not going to use a separate email client regularly, now is the time to set this up so it works for you during the next outage.

Use Offline Gmail

Yesterday’s outage prevented most users from even logging into the Gmail interface and when they could, the compose message feature was not functioning properly. Offline Gmail, a feature of Google labs, allows you to access the Gmail interface offline. This doesn’t mean that you will be able to send and receive during an outage because this feature still uses the web interface for that. What it does mean is you will be able to read emails that you have cached locally and compose messages to be sent as soon as Gmail is back online. Take a look at what Offline Gmail is all about and see if it will get you through next time.

20 thoughts on “Gmail Without The Cloud: Tips For Next Time

  1. I was pretty surprised to see that there isn’t a “We’re sorry, try again later page” .. weird to me that I had to go to google, search for “gmail down” to learn about the outage.

  2. wierd. i didn’t even know that it was down! all i knew at the time was that people were really complaining (my google reader page was covered in gmail news). i was able to get new email, compose and everything.

  3. Hello!
    According to an article yesterday, Google was trying to upgrade a webserver. They actually miscalculated on the amount of time this would take.
    And @elvisthedj yes tere is just such a page. It is the one you see when trying to logon to your Google Mail page.

    The gang there builds their servers out of COTS (Commercial Off The Shelf) hardware, so they need to keep tweaking it.

  4. I used to have my own email servers. I was hosting about 170 domains on them and it was a pain in the butt. Spam filtering never got up to snuff on my system and while I had windows servers (yeah, ew) I was constantly battling hacks. Things got marginally easier when I moved to linux, but never compared to google hosted services.

  5. I was actually logging into Gmail when this happened. I got the web interface for the login and my login was taking forever. Then I tried again and got the Google Error 502 page that looks like it was made in 1995.

  6. Is this really news? I mean I was on gmail all day and never noticed an outage, and even so it was for a short time. If it were for days I could see people moaning but for an hour or two? Really? WGAS?

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