Keep in mind, you can access Gmail via IMAP. There's a difference between Gmail Web Viewer issues and Gmail as a mail service. I haven't yet had a problem with

Keep in mind, you can access Gmail via IMAP. There's a difference between Gmail Web Viewer issues and Gmail as a mail service. I haven't yet had a problem with Gmail as a mail server. At our school, we've had by-and-large great responsiveness when addressing specific issues with the Google Apps team. There's definitely a deep buffer between support staff and engineers, but Google also has some of the most knowledgeable support staff at a "tier 1" level that I've worked with. They're also working with people who literally switched to Gmail because their mail servers crashed and the schools had no way to bring mail back. This becomes frustrating sometimes when you have to wait for the mail to bounce back from the proper person when You've demonstrated competence in the area you're trying to troubleshoot. (The year prior to moving students to Gmail, we actually had a higher uptime when scheduled downtime is excluded.) It is hard to pin down the recent slowness issues. The most easily repeatable issue is domain-based contact 'auto-complete' went from taking seconds (3s-5s) to sometimes completely timing out. Also, the Google Chat connector recently seems to be losing connection more regularly. It hasn't been bad enough to create a ticket, but we do have a conference call Monday. As far as free, non-apps usage: I hate to pull the "what do you expect for 'free', but, well, what do you? I get more transparency and uptime from Gmail than I had when I was on Yahoo! Mail (not sure if that's still the case).