So Gmail is down, what's the next best free alternative for personal usage?
Edit: Unable to send e-mails since 2:30 PM. Not necessarily looking to switch but would be great to have a backup if ever they take longer to resolve the outage.
Gmail Is down: Best Alternative to Gmail
Related Stores
Comments
Same here. But Twitter (and some tech sites) say otherwise.
I was wondering why it was trending on twitter
Yea. no issues with Gmail.
So it's been down for a couple of mins and you're already switching?
No, not necessarily switching, just need a backup in the event it takes a lot longer to recover and restore services.
Edit: Unable to send e-mail since 2:30PM.
To answer the question: ProtonMail is probably the best you can get security/safety wise, other than that you have your usual big email/website companies who offer email services (Outlook, iCloud Mail, etc), as well as ISP's (Telstra, Optus, etc)
i recommend this as well.
It looks like google must be down for you as well.
Google search is working for me, but I'd rather go for community answer than google results/reviews which may be paid advertisements.
Wow, I didn't even know Gmail was down. Must only be one server as I've been using it all day. Anyways you can monitor their status page here https://www.google.com/appsstatus#hl=en&v=status.
For alternative email services you could use ProtonMail or LavaBit.
Thank you kind stranger.
Try Microsoft Outlook..
Hotmail
I did have an important email to send in the down time, apologised for sending from Hotmail :-/
If you've got Hotmail, you've pretty much got Outlook too;
https://www.express.co.uk/life-style/science-technology/9838…
You could try Bigpond? Oops, their service has been abysmal for the past week! Downloads timing out and/or taking forever.
Excite mail
Angelfire
Netspace
I think the outage was to do with sending with attachments. I had normal messages work, but fails with attached files.
Gmail has pretty close to perfect availability for more than a decade, certainly better than any client devices I have owned, and better than any other mail service I have used.
Computers and networks sometimes break. That is life.Email is pretty vital to me, so I back it up, and have more than one address. But the short answer is an email address is a single point of failure - you can take that single point further upstream and send all your mail to more than one reader or POP3 server, but you still have single points in DNS and SMTP mail queues.
The way email is architected makes it recover from service interruptions up to 5 days long, so it already has great reliability and a good RPO, but making it available at more than the (my guess, not reported figures) of 99.99+ gmail has likely exceeds any reasonable way of working.
High availability systems require end to end control of all facets - internet email by definition can’t be that. If you need real fault tolerance, it is possible, but you need to get everyone sending the messages and yourself to use a system designed for high availability. In banking and defence they have these kind of messaging systems, but they are extremely costly and you sacrifice the ease of use and compatibility internet email has. Email is kind of the opposite. It was designed to work even in poor availability conditions. For the old folk to remember, it could be worse, it could be UUCP, a system comparable to carrier pigeons. I once had a message returned undeliverable after 300 days.
A non-computer analogy would be saying you bought a unimog and use it all the time, can we now make it faster than a Ferrari. Or maybe vice versa. The original design was made to do one thing (keep going no matter conditions) and seeking it to perform at a precision level of performance would require a different basic design.
Since both email and gmail are things I’m really interested in I’ll back this message up with an observation that gmail is a massive non-intuitive system economically.
Classical economics (and I will say all economics but hope someone will show me someone thinking about this who has a theory that says I am wrong) says you should expect lesser results from a free service than a paid one.
Gmail, however, has enviable performance and features despite being free. While I understand the revenue model is about selling personal data, it is remarkable that there is no real competitor who can offer better features/reliability/service for a modest cost. And that is all because they swiftly attained such scale, and used an IT architecture that benefited from scale, that they get more reliable as they grow (because they can add more nodes) and their unit costs decrease.So I think there won’t ever be a reasonable competitor (somebody with an outlook.com address will protest) for mail, unless something big changes. Maybe a hack that exposed everybody’s mailbox or a global privacy law change that made their revenue model break. I think this is unlikely.
But the bottom line is that in most areas of life you can pay a bit more and get something better. But for email, you can pay a lot more, and still not have a service as good as the free, privacy jeopardising one.
Thanks for the detailed explanation. It looks like the issue has been resolved. I was trying to send one without an attachment.
I guess I'm still surprised to experience such disruption from one of the largest if not the largest e-mail cloud service, where as you mentioned being in cloud is usually associated with high availability. But I reckon you covered it in your explanation considering others were not aware of the outage, I guess only a small portion of servers may have had the issue and didn't fail over the user requests to another server, it might even explain the difference in attachment as you noticed.
As for competitors, I feel like other FAANG has enough network/users/fanbase, so I still hope for the day a real competitor to emerge. Perhaps it might take some extra storage or radically new feature that would hook users into another platform. Facebook might be the closest one should they wish to, considering their user base, and they already have instant messaging apps after all. Here's to hoping we have an fmail email address in the next decade.
Gmail is one additional data point in the whole google ecosystem. They get your info from your search queries, what you watch on youtube, which sites you go to, where you literally go (or look up directions to) and finally what you write in your emails and what people send you. Each aspect of the ecosystem makes every other aspect stronger.
This is one benefit of 'platforms'. If everyone is on your platform, you can make yourself stronger to fend off rivals and spread the cost over your huge user base.
I agree with you on the intuitiveness though, things that are free should intuitively be worse than things you pay for. (However I believe that google does sell Gmail/Gsuite to enterprises although I could be wrong. I have a university 'gmail' but I have no idea if the school paid google for it).
Zoho mail.
Here's an update. So apparently the servers were shut down manually by Google themselves to fix an exploit that should be fixed four months ago. The only reason it was shut down yesterday because the security researcher who reported the issue 4 months ago released the proof of concept online, which made Google engineers panic.
https://www.zdnet.com/article/google-fixes-major-gmail-bug-s…
Great read! Well that priority 2, severity 2 bug escalated quickly upon disclosure.
Working fine for both my personal and enterprise (G Suite) accounts.