Silly Engineer

Googles Ben Treynor, Vice President of Engineering and Site Reliability Czar has made a blog post apologising and explaining the source of yesterdays Gmail blackout.

He has said that ironically the problem was at least partly caused by recent changes which have been implemented to 'improve service reliability'. And blamed the blackout on pesky 'request routers'.

You can read his whole blog post here : http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2009/09/more-on-todays-gmail-issue.html

Silly engineer!

Gmail tips from Google

Google have been as helpful as ever, and provided a run down of all of the best features og it's email platform, through handy tips. You can train as a Gmail Ninja - with useful tips for the white belt, green belt, black belt, and then the Gmail Master Ninja

You can find these tips .... http://www.google.com/mail/help/tips.html#white

And of course, don't forget to let me know what you think!

Gmail goes down 1st September 2009 (9/1/09)

Google Mail, the all in one email solution from the pre-eminent search engine, is down. :(

Twitter has been flooded by 'tweets' confirming the blackout, with over 5,000 tweets containingthe word 'gmail' reported per minute (22.17 GMT)

Luckily some of these tweets offered solutions, as Gmail still works through the following platforms:

• iGoogle - just go to www.google.co.uk/ig and login using your google email address and password. Click 'inbox' and VOILA! you will be presented with your gmail. (or if you haven't yet configured your dashboard, just Add Stuff >> and add your inbox)

• The POP3/IMAP protocols are still functioning. Which basically means you can access your Gmail through your desktop email client, such as Mozilla Thunderbird or MS Outlook.

• It has also been reported that the Iphone and Blackberry Gmail clients are still functioning correctly.

It seems to appear then, that Google have outdone themselves even in failure.

the Gmail.com website may be down, but in being so, it has caused people to experiment with and migrate to, other applications to access their content in your broadly spread web. Bravo!