I don't agree, if you offer a service to many, many people it becomes harder to offer 100% uptime. The biggest problem for mail service provider is spam, more than 80% of all mail traffic is spam.
That's why I think gmail is doing fine, it's up to the user to create solutions to have fall-back resources

Typical, say it's up to the user to make up for technology's failings.

I'm sick of people making excuses for technology, and criticism forces
companies to make things better. If enough people complain and demand
better products, maybe we'll get them.

Sure you're right there is no excuse, but the spam is the reality.
A email company can't stop the spam and people don't like to pay for mega strong servers because of spammers.

I guess the solution would be to offer premium services in a premium data center by a premium company (how much should that cost?)

Man, I wish you'd put more than a half second's worth of thought into this post

Why, what is wrong with downtime once in a blue moon. It is not possible to have 100% uptime. Stuff happens, unexpected stuff happens. > 99.9% uptime is more than acceptable. So just lay off. As long as humans are involved, we will mess it up. It's an unfortunate reality.

What a doof.
There is a reason companies don't sell 100% uptime. They cannot provide it.
This blog sounds to me like a whiny kid who has a simple unobtainable goal and can't understand why it isn't done.
I have an idea. Try providing the service yourself. You will learn that all the apps/os/infrastrucure is all run by humans and we all make mistakes. Even the best.
Quite complaining and provide. Anyone can be a critic, please show me when you provided 100% of something over a year or multi-year time frame.
What a waste.

You act like I'm the only one annoyed at Google for this problem. So do you just sit and smile at everything around you, and only expect higher standards from the things you're talented at? What happens when there's a toenail clipping in your hamburger? Decide to go to chef's school before filing a complaint?

No offense to you, but your research is non-existent, your grasp of the concept you're touting seems to be negligible, and you clearly don't understand how GMail works when you talk about mail clients.

100% Uptime Guarantees are nothing more than hopeful assertions by the company, simply because nobody can guarantee 100% Uptime and deliver it, no matter what. Why? Because SOMETHING can always go wrong, somehow. Reputable large scale service providers in all industries don't offer 100% guarantees; they offer what are called Nine's Guarantees. It's the same general assertion as a 100% guarantee, but with provisions for unpredictable faults.

Our ISP/VOIP provider offers three tiers of support and service based on scale and cost. Three Nine's means that the service will be up 99.9% of the time, which in a given year means that the server can be down 8.76 hours a year, give or take a leap year. Four Nines means that it can be down about fifty two minutes a year, give or take a few minutes. And Five Nines, 99.999% of the time, is about five seconds of downtime per year. That doesn't mean that no server can ever be down, just that the external user can't see anything different.

Why offer increasing nines instead of promising full service forever? Because things outside of your control, or totally unpredicted things like GMail's recent outage, can occur. GMail's Three Nines guarantee allows them eight hours of outage per year, and when/if those limits are exceeded in a given year, they pay out against their SLA for licensed users. To my knowledge, nobody at the level of Google/MSN/Yahoo offers 100% uptime, and all of them have certainly suffered outages in the past, rendering that offer invalid even if they had made it. Nobody expects it, and nobody can actually offer and guarantee it, so nobody offers it.

FYI, your Old School mail app would have been just as useless as my web-based browser interface. Why? Because the routers at the top level of GMail's services were down. In other words, no traffic in, no traffic out. Some users were able to interface via POP/IMAP, some were not. This is likely due to Google's efforts at shifting load and bringing new equipment online as fast as possible. If the server is down, it doesn't matter if you're using Outlook, or Entourage, or just plain Firefox web mail, it's DOWN.

100% up time is currently thought to be impossible. That's why it's a billion dollar idea.

The fact that you have an audience is offensive.
Nothing is 100% uptime. Your little desktop email client will not have 100% uptime. Viruses happen, kernel panics happen, head crashes happen.

Even the space shuttle computers which are considered the pinnacle of coding excellence- has 1 error in 420,000 Lines of code. That equates to 99.99976% reliability rate. Regular commercial software is closer to 5,000 errors per 420,000 lines.

The very notion that a system must run for an indefinite amount of time statistically amounts to the fact that it is literally impossible for any system to be available 100% of the time.

Wow, you have really opened my eyes. I guess I'll just consider it par for the course when my XBOX gives me the red light of death.

Well... You got the traffic that you wanted. What I want to know is if you will be man enough to apologize?

If you decide not to apologize, then I look forward to reading a story about you in INC or Fortune about America's newest billionaire who figured out how to develop 100% uptime email.

Oh, I am so sorry. I truly apologize for just expecting a product to work. Do you forgive me my dear Devo? Please will you forgive me.

For the first time in a decade, I bothered to follow the link from the gmail outtage on a computerworld write-up to see for myself that someone would put their real name to the drivel they had posted.

I'm not even going to go into the comic-book-guy scathing that (I hope) you know you deserve, because at least you brought some traffic to your site.

There is a reason 100% uptime isn't offered as a service. There is a reason gmail, at this point in time, is free: (as someone else pointed out) google isn't going to charge for something it cannot reliably deliver.

If you knew what had happened, if you knew what you were talking about, the issue wasn't with "e-mail" it was with the delivery mechanism, and their lack of appreciation of user load on their routers. A shortsightedness which they are culpable, but big enough to admit their error. It had nothing to do with "40 year old email"

So, Kudos on getting some traffic on your site. Maybe less so for puking out your ignorance on the matter.

Dave Connelly
dgconnelly@gmail.com

I enjoy the blog community and I find useful information constantly trough these channels, but sometimes not researching really leads to misinformation. Its not a simple on/off switch to make something have 100 percent uptime. In fact, even paying a premium(which are often huge for companies. Ask people whose have worked for EDS or IBM Tivoli) the best they can do is 99.99% Uptime.

I used to work in email metrics and these thought processes are exactly why modern IT is often so mismanaged. You often get a CIO with no tech experience spouting off "well it should be up 100 percent of the time!" when really it is cost wise almost impossible. Think about the resources needed to ensure 100 percent uptime. They would need to build not one but MULTIPLE Server Farms in different locations(also on different electronic grids). You'd also have to have the email services route to these locations on completely separate channels. Now after google spends millions and possibly billions of dollars for this service then they would have to find the customers for it(Good Luck). And you know what after all of this you still probably won't have 100 percent uptime.

I'm not saying email can't improve, it can and it needs to. Seriously though, its free, its pretty reliable, and you're not going to do better so find alternate resources when its down.

At least one comment not raking me over the coals.

Here's the deal - this post is a rant. I didn't put much thought into it. I wrote it when I was annoyed due to the Gmail outage. Yes, I understand 100% uptime is technically impossible and probably too much to ask for. And I realize it would take a technological breakthrough, which is why I mentioned it was a "billion dollar idea."

But consider this post the viewpoint of the end user. We flip a switch and just expect things to work. Cable TV, electricity, water, Internet, the daily mail, you name it. And we get annoyed when it doesn't. Voicing one's opinion should not be discouraged.

And hey, obviously I set myself up for the entire Internet to call me a moron, so have at it.

Your problem was that you were quoted on ComputerWorld and your rant was passed for something authoritative. I'm glad you're starting to recognize how ridiculous your post was because it absolutely was. Saying you're mad at gmail so you're going to use it through your mail app is ludicrous.

I've been using gmail for personal and professional email since they first sent me a beta invite (5 years ago) and this is the first time I've ever had problems. I am extremely satisfied with gmail and you should be too.

It was the web interface that was having problems. And using a desktop email client means I have all the emails stored locally. After this experience I'm just saying it's worth it to me to pull all the emails down.

It was the routers behind the GMail servers in general that were having problems. The reason that people with POP/IMAP access were occasionally still able to access their mail directly was that they take less load to retrieve data than a web interface, and so they were spottily reliable, while the web interface was mostly down.

For the record, GMail already makes an offline availability for their web interface. It's in the Labs feature; you just install Google Gears.

@Dan - That the rant was "passed for something authoritative" isn't the fault of the author of this blog. Blame ComputerWorld if they misrepresented or misappropriated Webomatica's post.

The length and style of the blog post above make it clear that it's just a short, off-the-cuff rant and nothing more.

That others want to read more or make more out of it is what's truly silly, not the post itself.

Thankfully we do have some "services" with 100% uptime (at least at present). The sun is one that I can think of. Yeah, yeah snarky commenters, I realize the earth's rotation might cause some relative downtime depending on how you're measuring things ;-) Many boastful, young-adult males might also claim 100% uptime for their libidos...

I agree with the OP....as an email admin myself, we should strive for higher than 99.9%.

Is it hard? Yeah! Is it possible? Definitely.

Businesses with smaller budgets than Google are running 99.99% a year.

Mistakes do happen, yes, but you can't market yourself as an enterprise business solution and then expect everyone will be fine with 2hrs downtime in the middle of the business day.

As an e-mail administrator, then, you should understand that smaller....is easier. How hard is it to manage an Exchange or POP server with ten users? Easy. At most, two synchronized servers can manage the maximum load with high reliability. Your net traffic per node will never exceed ten logins at once. At the world-wide enterprise level, with hundreds of millions of logins a day, it becomes a BIT harder, in case you didn't know.

Three nines (99.9% uptime) is remarkably easy to guarantee for ten users. For ten million, world-wide, the requirements and the costs and the risks go up so far that you probably don't even have the technical know-how to calculate them; I certainly don't.

As far as their downtimes go, look up the other big players. In 2008, Yahoo had a multi-stage outage that affected hundreds of thousands of users for *four days*. Hotmail had trouble in November 2006 on and off for several days. They don't offer the same reliability that Google does, which is good because they obviously can't meet it either. I'm not saying that Google didn't fail at what they did, which they most certainly did fail, I'm just saying that at their scale, the issues become a bit harder.