Should We Just Quit Gmail, or What?

• Tweet
• Email
• Sharebar

• Tweet
• Email

So Gmail is down again today for some of us. Let the onslaught of angry tweets begin:

Gmail contacts have been down for hours now… Why am I starting to feel like Google is slowly turning into Microsoft…

the deal with Gmail is: give up your life, gain awesome apps. this morning i’ve fulfilled my side… but now i wait

Thanks Gmail…. just another reason to have a Hotmail account!

Okay, so it’s easy to bag on Google for this and make you regret your decision to switch to Gmail in the first place. I mean, heck, what good is email if you can’t use it, right? Well, I don’t get too mad about it for a few reasons:

Reason #1: Nothing is 100% reliable. Nothing. Ever.

The “what if it goes down” attitude needs to be applied to just about every form of communication. Your cell phone can fall in the toilet. Your internet connection can go down. Mail sometimes gets lost. Your electricity can go out right in the middle of a Packer game (happened over the weekend – neighbors’ kid plowed a 4-wheeler into the electrical box and knocked out the power for the entire block). Your car can break down. The plane you’re in may need an emergency landing. The sun can be blocked by clouds all day, etc.

I could go on and on. The truth is, you always need a backup plan for everything in life. If you are running your life through Gmail (and you should!), you need to have a backup plan for when it goes down periodically. If you are putting all your eggs in the Gmail basket and not backing that up somewhere, you only have yourself to blame if your day goes off the tracks because of a little outage.

Reason #2: Outages are generally pretty short.

A few hours feels like decades in today’s “gotta-have-everything-NOW” world. But in the grand scheme, it’s not so bad. If your computer dies and you use Outlook for your email, it can be days before you get your email back up, and even then, you might not get your mail back, which leads me to…

Reason #3: I haven’t lost my mail or anything.

Even if Gmail goes down for a while, when it’s back up – you don’t notice much of a difference. Email that was sent to you in the meantime is still there. Email that you’ve kept is still there. If you’re storing all your email on your home computer, you run the risk of losing all of it when that computer goes down. Google keeps your mail backed up in several places that are in different locations. If something happens to one of your databases, they can just switch to one of the backups and you’re fine.

Reason #4: There are almost always different ways to get your Gmail during an outage.

If you open up a Web browser, type in “http://mail.google.com”, and you can’t access your mail, you’re not completely out of luck. While not always the case, many times there are several ways you can access your Gmail in the event of an outage and not ruin your entire day:

Your smartphone. Google Sync can push your email, contacts, and calendar to your phone, if you have the capabilities. My Windows Mobile phone can pull email from Google into its own email program. It may not always be the most convenient, but it’s something.

Microsoft Outlook. As much as I hate bloated, overpriced Microsoft products, Outlook is on a lot of computers. You can set up Outlook to grab your Gmail, and, like today’s outage, you won’t miss a beat.

Mozilla Thunderbird. I don’t have Outlook, and many of you don’t, either. Mozilla Thunderbird comes from the same company that makes Firefox, so  you know it’s good. It’s like a free version of Outlook. As you can expect, then, you can set it up to pull your Gmail, and it works the same way. It has an Account Wizard, so you just have to tell them you use Gmail, enter in your information, and it will automatically set it up for you.

Set up Gmail’s Offline Access feature. Lifehacker has a great article on setting this up, but it basically allows you to access your Gmail whether Gmail is up or not, and whether or not you have a working internet connection.

A little preparation goes a long way…

You know there’s going to be outages. Everything online has outages (Twitter, anyone? Facebook?). If you rely on this stuff, take a few steps to ensure that it won’t ruin your life. It’ll take five minutes. I understand that a company at Google’s level needs to be more reliable, but I’m not about ready to throw it under the bus yet. As long as I know there are ways to keep using it, I’ll keep using Gmail.