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"How is it that desktop mail clients are less reliable than gmail...?" Made me chuckle. I've been told off by a former Googler colleague enough times now to ha
by tehwalrus 11y ago
"How is it that desktop mail clients are less reliable than gmail...?"
Made me chuckle. I've been told off by a former Googler colleague enough times now to have learned that Gmail is more complex than anyone imagines on a first guess, in order to be "reliable".
- johansch 11y agoIt is certainly the google service that I use the most. In a decade of quite heavy usage I remember one outage of a 1-2 hours (with no data loss). To me this is the gold standard that the rest of us should aspire to. :)
- CuriousSkeptic 11y agoLately (last year or so) I've started to notice substantial data loss. Either old mails completely missing or large mails being truncated (destroying inline images f.ex.) So to anyone relying on gmail for safe keeping: Don't.
- johansch 11y agoNo offense (I have no idea who you are and how much you know), but... Do you feel you are you competent enough (in e.g. SMTP and MIME) to distinguish between MIME-encoded base64 inline images (super rare) and references to images on external web sites (a lot more common)? Which in the case of old web sites are quite likely to stop working if you revisit old mails. Did you make the effort to verify that it was the first type when you witnessed this?
- ambicapter 11y agoYou really could have just worded that as, 'are you sure those images weren't linked to external websites' without resorting to questioning his competence and trying to cover it with a 'no offense' (laff).
- johansch 11y agoThat's a good point - that would have been less loaded. (The question remains the same though, doesn't it?) Also - your suggestion would have been a lot less douchey without that "laff".
- CuriousSkeptic 11y agoActually, yes. However, to be fair, it didn't extend farther than noticing that I couldn't rescue it by copying over the data, because when viewing the "original" the base64 text simply stopped. Wether the data was lost on the server, or simply never transmitted for other reasons (size limit in the UI?) I don't know. It was inline do by means of a data-url in an img-tag in case you want the details ;) And no offense taken. It's a fair question.
- nickpsecurity 11y agoI get the opposite problem: stuff I delete periodically comes back. Google has less incentive to fix that due to their business model. ;)
- scottlamb 11y ago> Lately (last year or so) I've started to notice substantial data loss. Either old mails completely missing or large mails being truncated (destroying inline images f.ex.) Please write to support and ask them to investigate. I used to work on the Gmail backend team, so I know bug reports regularly make it through support to an engineer. I also know they take data integrity quite seriously and have a variety of tools to investigate (potential) problems, both proactively and in response to user complaints such as yours. They also keep redundant copies of everything.
- marcosdumay 11y agoInteresting that none of the cited software uses maildir. Breaking a mbox is an extremely simple thing, as the format leaves no possibility of error checking, parallel writing, rewriting lost data, or anything else. Outlook's mail folders are marginally better, allowing for error detection, but really, that's a lame first paragraph for introducing a great article.