Gmail stopped working, but Outlook users didn’t have to worry.
Saul Hansell at the New York Times is reporting on an outage on the popular Gmail service.
The Gmail breakdown happened at the start of the working day in Europe and lasted until about lunchtime. Early risers in the USA might have noticed the problem too.
Google isn’t saying much, the Gmail help site only says:
“2/24/2009
Many of our users had difficulty accessing Gmail today. The problem is now resolved and users have had access restored. We know how important Gmail is to our users, so we take issues like this very seriously, and we apologize for the inconvenience. “
What’s interesting to us is that the problem seemed to be with the Gmail web interface – the underlying email technologies were reportedly working fine.
That means Outlook users who connect to Gmail via IMAP or POP/SMTP could continue using their email, bypassing or even unaware of the problems Google was having.
You can receive/send email from Gmail into many email clients including Outlook using POP/SMTP. Google has instructions for Outlook 2007, Outlook 2003 and Outlook 2002 (XP) – the latter can be applied to earlier versions of Outlook too.
For a full synchronization of Gmail folders with Outlook, choose the IMAP option. Google has instructions for Outlook 2007 and Outlook 2003.
Another choice is to forward Gmail messages to another account which can then be imported into Outlook.
It’s not clear what happened to Gmail users using a browser with the new offline service option. At worst there browsers where ‘offline’ – no new messages arrived and outgoing messages where held until a connection could be established.
We like Gmail a lot but it’s best not to rely on it alone – this event has highlighted the wisdom of having alternative methods of accessing your email, whomever hosts it.
