Gmail Is Freaking Me Out
10:37 pm January 17th, 2007 by Sal Cangeloso
OK, I’ll admit it: I rely on Gmail for my personal mail. Yes, I have a server and a few other hosting accounts, but I really like Gmail. I originally went there for the great design and usability, but stayed, in part, because of the warm and fuzzy feeling I get when I remember Google is protecting my data. I mean, it’s Google, the company whose shares sell for $500 and could (allegedly) lose entire data centers without any interruption of service, what could go wrong?
Well, there have been a few incidents lately. And some accounts were, uh, deleted. But everything is better, right?
Well, most of the issues have been addressed very quickly, but it seems like everything is not perfect. Today Gmail was down for some time, according to a few different sources. Personally I did not experience any outage, but this is not confidence inspiring. I did notice that Google Calendar was loading extremely slowly all evening, something else which is problematic.
I can’t really say whether Gmail went down for me or not because I have been keeping myself logged out whenever I am not using it. Normally Gmail is always open in a browser window so I can check it frequently, but after reading about more security problems, including another XSS issue, I have put Gmail on lockdown. I won’t lie, this is a major hassle, because it also keeps me logged out of Calendar and Reader, so I have to log in an out of all three all day long.
By using a single password for all my dealings with Google I feel like any vulnerability would be catastrophic, especially once you factor in things like Mail Catcher (which I still don’t use) and Google for Domains (also which I don’t use). Yes, I being somewhat alarmist- the last security problem only allowed people to grab a list of contacts- but in issues like this I always fear for the worst. Plus, the ZDnet blog did say that the XSS maneuver can “can steal cookies and hijack your Google account” so maybe there is some cause for concern.
I still back up my Gmail account about once a week to my local system, and despite my fears I haven’t seen any reason to switch to another provider. I am going to keep a close eye on it and I think the people at Google realize that this is an important enough product that they have to keep it running well, so I am hoping for the best. I can’t wait for a non-free version, so we can have a few additional features and assurances.
How do you backup your gmail to the your local system? Thanks, Kendall
Kendall,
I wish I had a better method than this, but I just set up my Gmail as a POP email account in Outlook that I open up once a week. This way it downloads all my messages to my computer. I normally use Thunderbird (and I could do the backup with that) but Outlook was easier b/c this way I don’t have to be constantly downloading these emails and I can keep them separate from my main email accounts.
There is a non-free version. It’s called Google Apps Premier Edition, https://www.google.com/a/
Although I should add that it doesn’t seem to be any more reliable than the free version.