That's 3 strikes, and Gmail: you're out. I'm moving my domains off gmail as the primary MX.

Is there a viable alternative to gmail for conversation view and search?

This mentality always strikes me as odd; like firing an employee when they make a mistake.

The key factor to consider should be "Have they learnt from this?". The outage has happened. It won't unhappen. The question now is, will Google fix the problems that caused this, or don't they care.

The 3 mistakes in short succession show that they haven't learnt from this, and I should make provisions for myself.

Somewhat similar to a staff member who has had 3 warnings is obviously not learning.

You'd be right - if it happened only once. Or twice. It's not really like firing someone, though - if your bank keeps screwing you up, woudln't you consider opening an account somewhere else...?

Not that I know of, though I've moved from google apps to hosted exchange with Sherweb and couldn't be happier. I love the fact that my calendar & address book sync wirelessly with my iPhone. Also, push email is great.

> Is there a viable alternative to gmail for conversation view and search?

Mutt but you'll have to type "ot" to order by thread and "l~b<word>" to search (limit) by <word> in the body of your mail.

Web or desktop?

For desktop, a new entrance is Postbox, which takes a lot of clues from GMail: http://www.postbox-inc.com

Personally, I use gnus: http://www.gnus.org

Mail.app on OS X has a very nice threaded view. It's not exactly the same, but it's still very nice:)

Can your spam filters do better?

Mine do as well, yes. I'm not knocking GMail's spam filters, but it's absolutely possible to run your own mail server virtually spam free. I've had the same primary e-mail address for 11 years, posted it all over the place, and I almost never see spam in my inbox.

The problem is that you will still receive the mail. If you run even a semi-popular website, your ___domain is going to be hit by all kinds of bogus mail. Since I'm a programmer not a server administrator, the CPU and IO was constantly overloaded because of spam. Whenever I switched to Google Apps, the hard drive breathed a sign of relief.

I'm sure if you take the time to properly administrate, you can run email on your own server. In my case it was too confusing, took too much effort, and I wanted to get back to doing real work.

Oh, I agree with you 100%. For 99% of the people out there, it makes far more sense to have someone else handle all that for you. You just have to accept there may be downtime that beyond your control.

I was merely answering lsb's question and pointing out that GMail's spam filtering isn't magic or unique. It's merely very good. A skilled mail server admin can replicate the same level of spam filtering. I'm not recommending that everyone run their own mail server.

FUD, it's only down for "a small subset of users". Works fine for me, both web and IMAP.

GMail's Wikipedia article suggests that 100 million people have used GMail. Even "a small subset" could be a substantial number of people.

... But yet the headline made it sound like all of Gmail was down when at best it's a small percentage. When the headline says "Gmail down" and I look over and see that Gmail is in fact not down, it's an incorrect headline.

Err.. the apps page shows no message for me atleast !?!

My Gmail is working considerably better than my access to HN recently.

The safest course would be to keep some other email ___domain, download it locally with whatever email client one prefers (as I have long done) but have everything forwarded to Gmail. That's what I did after a local computer crash hosed my access to email for a while. But now I like accessing my Gmail through Gmail's interface, EXCEPT for the lousy way that Gmail implements adding new names to address lists for mailing to multiple people at once. I've had no service interruptions at all the last few times Gmail service interruptions have been in the news.

I actually go the other way around. I have email forwarded to gmail before then getting forwarded to an email server on my own ___domain. I use GMail for spam filtering, archiving and sometimes for search and a quick web interface. Mostly I process email locally using gnus.

I used to use GMail's POP3 interface, but I found it unreliable at times, so that's why I switched to my own email server.

For those of us who like the gmail interface this seems like a reasonable option. But, you still have to "push" the problem to another provider. Who do you rely on for your 'some other email ___domain'?

Gmail acts as a POP client too, if you want to wrangle with that. It's in the options.