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Learn From the Gmail Fiasco: You Need Redundant Copies of Your Email–Don’t Worry, It’s Painless :-)

Posted on February 28, 2011 ·

Cartoon by Dave Walker

A few hundred thousand (numbers range from 150k to 500K) Gmail and Google Apps users had the scary experience of losing ALL their email content yesterday. Their account was accidentally “reset”. Google acknowledged the error, and issued a statement that they are working on restoring “lost” content.

Let’s stop and think here a minute. Is your lifetime’s worth of information sitting in email? Do you have redundant backups / copies? (there is a difference, as we’ll see). If not… stop everything, and rush to fix it.

There are a few steps anyone can take easily to have redundant copies of their entire email account – I don’t mean just backup to restore from, but live copies you can switch to any time.

Keep an offline copy in an email client. I don’t use email clients anymore, much prefer the native Gmail UI. But even if you don’t normally use email clients, you can still occasionally start Outlook, Thunderbird, Mac email…etc. Fetch everything via IMAP, then make redundant copies.
Auto-copy to another Google account. Set up an account you won’t actively use – its sole purpose is to fetch email from all your other email accounts (Google or external) via POP and serve as an archive….

(Cross-posted @ CloudAve » Zoli Erdos)

Filed Under: Personal Productivity, SaaS · Tagged: backup, CloudAve, data backup, email, Email client, gmail, Google, Google Account, google apps, hotmail, IMAP, Outlook, thunderbird, yahoo mail, zoho mail

Gmail, Don’t be a Yahoo!

Posted on November 5, 2010 ·

In the 90’s I used to laugh at friends who all used Yahoo! as their personal email service. I did not understand how anyone could put up with the slow speeds of web-mail, and tried to convince them to install a decent email client, like Outlook, which is what most of them used in their corporate jobs.

Then things changed: Outlook grew into a bloated monster, it brought otherwise fairly speedy computers to a grinding halt and finding stuff in the archives of years of email became a gargantuan job. A new web-based email service came to rescue: Gmail was fast, well-organized, included productivity-boosters like labels and conversation-threading, and most importantly, you could not only search but also find old email in seconds! For this former Outlook-fan the switch was a no-brainer – in fact I ended up ditching almost all desktop software, moving online. (Gmail for mail and Zoho for most other tasks).

Life was good, I stayed productive and Gmail grew into a suite of productivity services by Google. Too bad it’s breaking down – again…

(Cross-posted @ CloudAve)

Filed Under: Software · Tagged: CloudAve, gmail, Google, google apps, hotmail, Outlook, performance, productivity, yahoo, zoho, zoho mail

Resistance is Futile: We Will Be Assimilated – by Google.

Posted on February 11, 2009 ·

Two seemingly unrelated items:

Today Hitwise reported on how Google Maps is catching up on Mapquest, which once was the king of online mapping.

Perhaps more important than just the numbers is the source of traffic: 61% of Google Maps traffic comes from links placed in organic Google Search results. Contrast that to Mapquest, where 8 out of 10 hits come from searches on the Mapquest brand itself. Translation: Mapquest is only used by its already dwindling user base, while Google Maps gains steadily, since Google owns Search. The writing is clearly on the wall.

The second story: Google Gmail Within Striking Distance Of Hotmail – reported Information Week a few days ago. Wait, wasn’t Gmail supposed to be email for the geeks only, lagging behind the masses of Yahoo and Hotmail users?

Between September 2007 and September 2008, Gmail’s visitor total grew 39%, from 18.8 million to 26 million, ComScore figures indicate. Windows Live Hotmail during this period saw its visitor share decline 4%, from 46.2 million to 44.6 million.

If Google’s Gmail growth rate rises to, say, 46% over 2009, it could reach approximately 43 million unique U.S. visitors by the end of the year. And if Windows Live Hotmail continues to bleed visitors at a rate of, say, 3%, it will finish the year with around 42 million unique visitors per month.

So Gmail may overtake Hotmail by the end of this year, and if the trend continues, it might overtake Yahoo by the end of 2011, concludes Information Week. Note, these are site visits, not account numbers, but account numbers include all the throw-away, long forgotten dormant accounts that both Yahoo and Hotmail has in abundance. All these email systems being web-based, visitor stats are a better representation of actual usage.

The third story (yes, I promised two, but can’t stop now): The Google Power Meter., currently being tested by Google employees. These are smart devices you plug in all around the house, they will report back to the mothership and you get a nice dashboard aimed at helping you making the right energy choices.

I would certainly like to know just how “smart” they can be – any chance of bi-directional communication? I can’t help but remember the mail campaign from PG&E, my utility company. They are handing out $25 to anyone who allows them to install a smart thermostat free of charge. The catch? At times when consumption reaches peak levels, the utility company can remotely throttle back your air conditioner. So now you see why I’m hesitant about these Google electricity meters. Could they be switched from passive reporting to regulating one day?

The fourth story (gee, I really have to stop soon): An opinion piece on Bloomberg discusses how the health provisions slipped into the stimulus bill will effect every one of us in the US:

Your medical treatments will be tracked electronically by a federal system. Having electronic medical records at your fingertips, easily transferred to a hospital, is beneficial. It will help avoid duplicate tests and errors. But the bill goes further. One new bureaucracy, the National Coordinator of Health Information Technology, will monitor treatments to make sure your doctor is doing what the federal government deems appropriate and cost effective. The goal is to reduce costs and “guide” your doctor’s decisions (442, 446).

Ouch. I’m all for electronic medical records, but I don’t want them to be turned into a Big Brother function. And I don’t want a computer program to decide on my medical treatment. But I’ve just complained about the Sorry State of Health 2.0: neither Google Health nor Microsoft HealthVault are up to the job yet. I want them to get there, and I trust they will (at least one of them). I don’t want them to run my health care, just help me and my providers manage it – but fear of potential misuse won’t stop my desire for progrees.

Do you see the trend here? Google is unstoppable. They want to manage all data, but our life is increasingly all about data and what we do with it. The former Borg in Redmond is now a toothless veteran, slowly dwindling away – Google is the New Borg. Resistance is futile. We’re being assimilated. And we like it. Enjoy the video: (better quality if you click through)

(This post originally appeared @ CloudAve. To stay abreast of Clod Computing, SaaS news and analysis, grab the CloudAve feed here.)

Filed Under: Business, Software, Technology · Tagged: borg, electricity, email, energy, gmail, Google, google maps, gotmail, health 2.0, health care, hotmail, mapquest, microsoft, monopoly, yahoo

Bite the Hand that Feeds You?

Posted on November 22, 2007 ·

There’s a new online Office player in town: Sabeer Bhatia, co-founder of Hotmail, the web-mail service that perfected viral marketing and got acquired by Microsoft for $400 million, unveiled his free web-office suite yesterday. It does not look at Google, Zoho or ThinkFree, it aims at Microsoft directly:

“We are just a few years away from the end of the shrink-wrapped software business. By 2010, people will not be buying software,” Mr Bhatia said. “This is a significant challenge to a proportion of Microsoft’s revenues.”

So be it – I am a certified web-app fanboy. I’m still waiting for my trial account (and wonder if I will ever get it after this post) , so I can’t comment on the applications themselves, but I think Mr. Bhatia’s choice of a name is rather tasteless: Live Documents. What’s wrong with that? Nothing.. except the close resemblance to Microsoft’s Windows Live brand. I only have “conspiracy theories” here:

Live Documents is a shameless rip-off of the MS brand, Mr. Bhatia is literally biting the hand that fed him and indirectly funded this company.
He is riding on Microsoft’s coat-tails: his application is (supposedly) very similar to MS Office 2007, he offers a plug-in to the MS products, uses the MS Office logo quite liberally throughout his site, people know his background with MS – all this creates the impression that his products is somehow jointly developed with Microsoft. (?) While this may help gaining traction initially, I think confusing customers is a very-very bad policy. (But what do I know, I haven’s sold a business for $400M)
Finally, the most far-fetched speculation: this is indeed Microsoft’s secret weapon, named appropriately so it fits easily after it’s absorbed in a $billion+ deal.

I can’t wait to hear from Microsoft… Don? Cliff? Chris? Anyone?

Update (11/23): Dan Farber on ZDNEt came to the same conclusions – literally.

Update #2: As much as I don’t like the Live copycat, I have to admit calling it “service plus software” is a smart play on Microsoft’s “software plus service“, indicating the shift in priorities.

Filed Under: Collaboration, Marketing / PR, Personal Productivity, Startups · Tagged: brands, Google, hotmail, live documents, marketing, microsoft, thinkfree, windows live, zoho

Gmail … Microsoft Style

Posted on November 20, 2007 ·

It’s definitely Holiday time: slow day, no news, my feed-reader is empty… took a walk outside, did not meet anyone. But for a minute I got confused, thinking we’re heading into April Fools’ Day, not Thanksgiving. It’s all because of Philipp Lenssen’s brilliant post: What If Gmail Had Been Designed by Microsoft?

I won’t spoil the fun, I want you to read his piece, here’s just a little teaser. Starting point, regular gmail:

He then rebrands Gmail to something longer, like Windows Live Gmail, change the URL to the more professional looking http://by114w.bay114.gmail.live.com/mail/mail.aspx?rru=home, adds new panes, breaks up messages from conversation threads into their individual parts, adjust the spam filter to be a bit more MS-like … etc. Here’s the final result:

I actually think this last pic is overdone…nevertheless, it’s good reading. Tomorrow Philipp plans to discuss “What if Microsoft had designed Windows Vista.” Artful play with the words. You could read it like this: “What if Microsoft had designed Windows Vista” – but we know that is the case, so that leaves us with the only possible interpretation: “What if Microsoft had designed Windows Vista.”

Filed Under: Humor, Software · Tagged: gmail, Google, hotmail, Humor, microsoft, microsoft design, vista, windows live mail, windows vista

Learn From the Gmail Fiasco: You Need Redundant Copies of Your Email–Don’t Worry, It’s Painless :-)

Gmail, Don’t be a Yahoo!

Resistance is Futile: We Will Be Assimilated – by Google.

Bite the Hand that Feeds You?

Gmail … Microsoft Style

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