Gmail had yet another problem yesterday, once again making it so millions of people couldn’t check their email. Apparently, Google took some servers down for maintenance and that caused the remaining servers to become overloaded. While they did come out and apologize for the downtime, it’s still unbelievable that they are having problems keeping Gmail from going down. Gmail is currently the third largest web based email service. I can’t remember ever hearing about Yahoo Mail or Hotmail (the top 2 email services) going down, but I doubt this will slow down Gmail’s growth in the long term. For some reason, people have a huge loyalty to Google that just boggles my mind.
Were you one of the Gmail users that couldn’t access the email because of the blackout? I know I wasn’t. I didn’t even know there was a blackout until I saw it last night. How did I manage not to be affected, you ask? Well, it’s because the blackout only affected people trying to get their email through the Gmail interface. The IMAP/POP servers were still running just fine. It seems like those servers work on separate routers and therefore were not affected by the blackout.
Since I have multiple Gmail accounts, I got tired of logging in and out all the time. I used the Gmail Manager extension for Firefox for a while, but now I use Mozilla’s Thunderbird. Remember how easy Firefox was to use over Internet Explorer? Well, Thunderbird is like that compared to Microsoft Outlook. As a matter of fact, setting it up with Gmail is super easy. You just do File -> New -> Account. Then, there is a Gmail option. Just put in your Name, the Email address, and click Finish. You will then put in your password and it will download your mail right to your computer. No more having to login to Gmail just the read a message, just open Thunderbird and it’s right there. And just like Firefox, you can download different Extensions and Themes.
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