Gmail appears to have another outage today. While reports of the outage surfaced on Twitter hours ago, Google’s status board indicated all was OK, until about 15 minutes ago, when this update appeared:
2:16pm: We’re aware of a problem with Google Mail affecting a small subset of users. The affected users are unable to access Google Mail. We will provide an update by April 16, 2009 3:16:00 PM UTC-7 detailing when we expect to resolve the problem. Please note that this resolution time is an estimate and may change.
Fair enough. But looking at the status overview gives a rather sad picture: on 3 out of the past 6 days Gmail suffered outages. That’s a bad ratio.
Today both vanilla @gmail.com and Google Apps (your domain) accounts are affected, both the free and Premium ($50) flavors.
But here’s the funny thing: I’m not entirely knocked out. I’ve recently described how I got my Google Apps acount synchronized with Zoho:
But I do have another backup, outside Google – the recently announced Mail service from Zoho, sponsors of this blog. I have my business Gmail accounts POP-ed into Zoho Mail, which, due to partly the way Gmail stores information and the filtering abilities in Zoho Mail is always in perfect sync with Gmail: even Sent Mail gets in the right place (typically a problem with POP) and I have all the auto-labels replicated from Gmail. It does not matter which service I use to send mail, it shows up in the right place on the other one.
While Gmail / Google Apps mail is down via the web inteface, it’s only half-dead via POP/SMTP (does anyone know IMAP status?). That means new emaile trickled into Zoho and I could continue sending email via SMTP. When Gmail wakes up, I’ll switch back to the native UI and all my data will be there. Of course you could do the same with other web-based services or IMAP down to a client like Thunderbird.
Update: As exciting as the week-old post about inserting an image is, perhaps 8 hours after the onset of an outage the Official Gmail Blog should spare a post to the issue…
Related posts:
I suppose there was no problem with the Imap because I could check mail through iPhone. Well, I didn’t have the issue with the web access either. So, we have to wait for someone who had problems with web access to confirm this.
Krish, it’s all over Twitter – and the Google Status page itself.