Putting All of Our E-Mail Eggs in One Basket: Gmail Down Once Again
I gave more thought to this column’s headline than I usually do (our editor-in-chief will heartily agree on this point, to be sure). Others that came to mind were “Don’t Send a Boy to Do A Man’s Job” or possibly “You Get What You Pay For.”
Regardless of what the headline reads, the fact is that more and more people are relying upon a free e-mail service, Gmail, for business purposes.
When it fails, which it seems to do with alarming alacrity, Gmail users go crazy. Yesterday, Gmail was down yet again, this time for almost two hours.
“I want to strangle someone” a senior executive at a large retail company said to me yesterday. “I told you not to outsource your mail to a free service,” was my reply.
The last major Gmail outage was in February, unless I missed one since then. This week’s would be the seventh major outage in one year. Most of what my colleague David Goldes had to say then still holds, so in the interest of brevity, I’ll ask you to continue here.
Google blames the outage on a capacity miscalculation during server maintenance. You can read what they had to say here. But I implore you, please go there one at a time so we don’t overload their servers.
Jonathan B. Spira is CEO and Chief Analyst at Basex.
September 2nd, 2009 16:01
While I fully understand your point — free service, how dare people depend on it, how dare people get upset when it is down — I think you may be taking this outage or even the seven serious gmail outages you have tracked and applying it to mean that users of a free service get what they deserve for the fee they are paying.
But I can tell you from my professional experience that very few email services, whether paid or not, are a whole lot better. Now maybe there are services I have not used which are better. I can’t say I have used all of them. But I have used many paid email hosting services and while some are CERTAINLY better than others, none are perfect. And from my experience, I would not tell a client that paying for an email service will result in fewer outages compared to gmail or another free provider. I just don’t believe it is true….if it is, please tell me who is better
So what’s my point? Well, I think that the benefit an email service provides is a combination of reliability/availability and perhaps other things. For example, features can be very important to users. While email users may always list reliability and availability as #1, spam fighting accuracy, storage space, web mail interface, IMAP/POP capability, integration with mobile devices, and ability to use other addresses (just to name a few), may be equally important.
So while I do see your point of view of ‘stop whining gmail users’, I think the blanket statement that a free email provider should not be DEPENDED on is going a bit far. Until a commercial, paid service can provide the fourth 9 of reliability and availability along with all the other features, I think I will still depend on free providers for solving certain problems for my clients in a very cost effective way.
-Carl
September 2nd, 2009 16:34
Carl, you are right that very few e-mail services may be better. The emphasis, however, is on the word service as opposed to in-house IT infrastructure. But I´ll come back to “e-mail as a service” in a moment.
Compare the Gmail user base to that at a single company, even a large company with 30,000 users. Sure, that company´s e-mail goes down once in a great while, but it impacts ONLY that company. Millions of users aren´t impacted. When Gmail goes down, because so many people have started to use it, millions actually are impacted.
Take Basex for an example. If our Lotus Domino server were to go down and our IT department can´t fix it (and there are redundant servers so several would have to go down), we have two levels of tech support to call upon. That´s not the case with the (free) Gmail service.
So back to e-mail as a service. There are companies which host e-mail that do offer four 9´s. They charge accordingly. But today e-mail is what makes the world go around so I´ll reiterate my initial comment, you get what you pay for.
September 7th, 2009 07:45
The interesting thing about these gmail outages for me is that for a long time a lot of people (including me) have been holding the biggest public/free email providers up as a benchmark for in-house enterprise email, and saying “Compare their uptime figures with yours. They’re better”.
Maybe it’s time to ditch that argument, in favour of better ones, but I’d love to see honest figures for Gmail and Hotmail outages versus a sample of multinational enterprises on Exchange or Notes.