True.Originally Posted by somebody
In the last couple of years its had a few outrages lasting up to a day. All documented at the time by the press. In face some were imap and pop3 the whole caboodle. One from memory was due to a Engineer pressing the wrong button taking the wrong server offline if i recall correctly.
Thats bad enough when its your email but all your work
Look at it this way - who would you trust with your emails - a giant corporation like Gmail with servers everywhere and many 1000's of people running it or a small company like Fastmail who provide a first class for-fee email service, but with only 4-5 staff, but with the best customer support for any email provider. Its a trade-off between free or paid, large or small.
The best advice I can give anyone is to backup, backup and backup again. So with emails, save a local copy on your computer, if your using IMAP, theres a nice little utility called IMAP Size that creates an archive of all your email on a regular basis, or, why not use the POP download function, and in the settings on GMail, select the option to "archive" a copy on the server, so you'll always have 2 copies of everything. The same for other email services - in your email client (Outlook Express, Windows Mail) select the option to "leave mail on the server".
No email service is totally reliable, they've all had outages at one time or another.
