Let us pay for this service so it won't go down
marco.org
marco.org
That's never been my experience at all. I've used Gmail via Thunderbird (mostly for Enigmail) for years with very very few problems. It occasionally chokes when sending large attachments, but it always works on the second try.
I've also been using gmail since it was invite-only beta and haven't experienced any major problems through the 7 years I've used it, not sure what everyone is complaining about.
Worth noting: I think the original complaint/idea (I think from Gruber or someone similar, I don't remember exactly) was more along the lines of having Twitter offer premium accounts that would never failwhale, and similar equivalents for other web services these days that seem to be falling apart under load. That idea I could understand, just not with Gmail.
After 15 years of running sendmail/postfix/uwimap/dovecot for a growing company, and uncounted spam fighting tools, I use google for all my mail accounts now. On their scale, they can do a better job at spam fighting than I can with only access to my own mail streams. (But I can beat them for reliability.)
1) The 10 connection limit bites surprisingly early. Mail.app makes multiple connections, and if you leave a couple computers logged in, carry an iPhone, and maybe use an iPad you will find yourself randomly blocked from your email. (Their "help"[1] article says you can reach the limit with as few as two sessions open.)
Google's solution is for you to remember to disconnect your computer from their IMAP servers when you are away.
2) IMAP searching is a mystery. I routinely have to use the web interface to search for things that I know are in my mail, but I can't find from Mail.app. I don't know who is at fault here.
3) I have instances of attachments becoming corrupted. Again, I can't conclusively place blame.
4) The strange organization issues from the "tags" vs. "folders" issues can be confusing to people that don't understand the nuts and bolts.
5) They have rather limited logging available. I recently had two laptops stolen which subsequently did IMAP updates while in possession of the parties unknown. Google's low granularity logging information (day and IP but no time information) caused trouble getting a court order to compel the ISP to produce the subscriber data. The court wants a specific time.
So there you have it. There are warts. But I'm not going to leave because they are great spam killers.
[1] They call it a "help article", but it really just says "This breaks, we know why, we do it deliberately, and we can't be bothered to make it better. Suck it, meatbag."
http://www.google.com/apps/intl/en/business/index.html
With a 99.9% uptime SLA:
http://www.google.com/apps/intl/en/terms/premier_terms.html
and
(Meantime, keep your emails backed up.)
I also hope, a bit, that the paid version means Gmail/Apps may have some degree of independence/durability that is separate from the advertising revenue. I'm probably wrong, though, at least at this point.
Changing email addresses is a pain -- better to do it now, while you can slowly transition with email forwarding. Use filters to auto-label mail that is sent to the old address, ask senders to change your address, and switch over any mailing lists and accounts as automatic emails come in.
This would still leave you with the problem of your history of emails being stuck within Gmail.
Additionally, most spam filters take the sending host into account ("this host is known to have sent a million spam messages today - let's not bother talking to it"), but this information is lost (untrustworthy) if you forward via another mail server; it's likely that GMail has a better spam filter than your cPanel provider, so try to give it all the information you can.
There are some minor other issues - faster delivery, less wasted disk space on the cPanel provider's end, message sizes are limited only by GMail - but the above are the main ones.
Do note that you need GMail "for domains" instead of just a @gmail.com address. The "for domains" version is free, though (perhaps up to some upper limit - 50 mailboxes?).
An interesting additional point given the ongoing trend towards web apps and storing data "in the cloud". Note that "own" in this sense means you need to be able to export it in a standard way (e.g. access via IMAP). I don't see a lot of enthusiasm for this from the big sites out there. I can only hope that users start to realise the value in this and begin demanding more control of the data they are creating.
http://www.livejournal.com/support/faqbrowse.bml?faqid=74
I wasn't a LiveJournal user, but saw one of Brad Fitzpatrick's excellent scalability talks years ago. I think he had a special flag that could be set for paid requests that would give them priority in perlbal, the load balancer he wrote.
Obviously it doesn't do much when something big is broken, but Brad did have a way to make sure paying customers' requests were processed first, and had realtime stats on average request latency for paid vs. free accounts.
And how did paying for service work out for Jott users who tied the whole thing into their voicemail and now have to untie it pretty quick?
The article isn't a plea to pay for gmail, which you probably inferred from reading the title or first paragraph.
There's no way to set it up without owning a domain!
He point of "its just IMAP" is mute. Gmail supports IMAP. Regardless of how reliable it is on and ongoing basis, if you look at it for the ability to export your data, its the same as what he has.
It sounds like his point is to use a smaller service. A smaller service would be less complex, but services that are bigger are likely popular for a reason.
A car that is a best seller is worth considering buying. You don't want to avoid a best seller just because its a best seller.
The closest you'll come to this if you have ONLY a paid option, which would eliminate the free users, and make the system far smaller and more manageable, in which case there WOULD be more up-time because people were paying.
But I agree, to to think a small subset of paying users will have any affect on the up-time of a major site is just a pipe dream.
You seem to rely on the assumption that every major site's budget is so lush that a small portion of the userbase paying would be unable to solve any of their technical or employee needs.
Look at reddit, their recent donation effort has gotten them servers and staff: http://blog.reddit.com/2010/11/help-us-help-you-help-us.html
You'd be crazy to say that those additional resources will have no affect at all on their uptime.
Funny, I clicked the link and saw this:
MessagingEngine.com Server Outage
[..] I'm sorry, the server your email is on is currently down. We apologise for the inconvenience; any email sent to you during this time is being queued by another server and will be delivered as soon as the server is working again.
http://cc.bingj.com/cache.aspx?q=http%3a%2f%2fwww.marco.org%...
I also appreciate the restatement of "You must own any data that’s irreplaceable to you." It's suprising how lost that simple fact is today.
If my customers can't email me for a week, I assure you that a partial refund on the fee from my email provider is not going to make things right.
Also, don't underestimate how much work it is to filer spam effectively.
email has a few huge disadvantages: you need to keep your address book up to date and your inbox is full of email from machines - notifications and bulk.
make an email provider that has a twist - maybe automatically sync it with your facebook friends as the address book and limit lenght of your replies.
Most of the time I use Gmail from its web interface. The few times I had problems with the webif, I launched my desktop client and used that.
As for using your own domain name, well, life is short. I can’t be bothered with all the small things.
If you use a paid service, expect downtime. Maybe less downtime than a free service, but it will still be there.
He is using IMAP because it makes it easy for him to migrate to another provider if the inevitable downtime becomes a problem.
You should try it. It's really useful for business emails.
I'm missing the connection here; does it somehow prevent people from making errors if you pay?
"I’ve seen many similar pleas recently whenever any popular, free web service has problems: “Please, let us pay you so there won’t be any problems!”
But it’s an impossible dream. If a web service is popular enough that you hear about it when it has downtime or major issues, it’s probably a large, very complex system. 100% uptime is effectively impossible."
As for being able to own your data and store local backups, you can do that with Gmail POP, or with Gmail IMAP and an email client that'll store messages locally.
(The author's argument that Gmail IMAP is buggy, is one anecdote; I can provide my own anecdote to the contrary. Again, we'd need some data to prove that FastMail is better.)
This is true, but his solution is not one that must use FastMail. His address is his own, and he backs up his own email. So if FastMail lost everything of his, he would be able to switch over to something else. That he owns his own email address is the important factor, not that he happens to use FastMail.
For the record, I use Gmail for all of my personal email, and I don't bother keeping backups.