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Of course, if my email goes down, it does not help me that other's is still up. In fact, if total downtime is constint, I would prefer they overlap.

verelo 10y ago
Well fortunately with the major influence Gmail has in the personal email and work email space these days, your wish is somewhat true. Having said that, Google certainly run many many mail servers, as such an outage that impacts delivery for one group of people does not necessarily impact everyone. This is the difference between robust systems and those with critical lynch pins that create system wide outages.
amelius 10y ago
> In fact, if total downtime is constint, I would prefer they overlap. So the people who are supposed to do work for you also can't work?
- gizmo686 10y ago
  I meant total downtime for each user. So if I lose email for an hour, and my worker loses email for an hour, it is better if those are the same hour, otherwise there are two hours when we can't email each other.
- derefr 10y ago
  If our email is down but our customers' email isn't down, then they think we're ignoring their "urgent" messages, and that's bad. But if everyone's email is down, they won't be able to send those messages, so they won't think we received them to ignore them. (Then again, email is kind of uniquely bad here, because of the way SMTP works as a store-and-forward protocol. In most protocols, if my server went down, your client wouldn't be able to connect to it, so it'd be pretty clear something is wrong. With SMTP, your client can just "put a message on the Internet" for my server to receive, and won't know for 48 hours or more that my server isn't there any more.)
throwaway8270 10y ago
> Of course, if my email goes down, it does not help me that other's is still up. Fortunately, you can have more than one mailbox. Things change with time, so one has to have backup channels anyway. > In fact, if total downtime is constint, I would prefer they overlap. To me it sounds like "I'd prefer if everyone would be getting sick at once": not a good scenario at all.

verelo 10y ago

Well fortunately with the major influence Gmail has in the personal email and work email space these days, your wish is somewhat true. Having said that, Google certainly run many many mail servers, as such an outage that impacts delivery for one group of people does not necessarily impact everyone. This is the difference between robust systems and those with critical lynch pins that create system wide outages.

amelius 10y ago

> In fact, if total downtime is constint, I would prefer they overlap. So the people who are supposed to do work for you also can't work?

gizmo686 10y ago
I meant total downtime for each user. So if I lose email for an hour, and my worker loses email for an hour, it is better if those are the same hour, otherwise there are two hours when we can't email each other.
derefr 10y ago
If our email is down but our customers' email isn't down, then they think we're ignoring their "urgent" messages, and that's bad. But if everyone's email is down, they won't be able to send those messages, so they won't think we received them to ignore them. (Then again, email is kind of uniquely bad here, because of the way SMTP works as a store-and-forward protocol. In most protocols, if my server went down, your client wouldn't be able to connect to it, so it'd be pretty clear something is wrong. With SMTP, your client can just "put a message on the Internet" for my server to receive, and won't know for 48 hours or more that my server isn't there any more.)

throwaway8270 10y ago

> Of course, if my email goes down, it does not help me that other's is still up. Fortunately, you can have more than one mailbox. Things change with time, so one has to have backup channels anyway. > In fact, if total downtime is constint, I would prefer they overlap. To me it sounds like "I'd prefer if everyone would be getting sick at once": not a good scenario at all.