Gmail has had more problems with downtime, and a small number users have been unable to access their accounts since early Tuesday morning -- when Google acknowledged "Temporary Error (502)". In most cases, the problem was fixed within a few hours, but a later Google post said:
We expect to resolve the problem for the remainder of the affected users of Google Mail at March 11, 2009 6:30:00 AM UTC-7. Please note that this time frame is an estimate and may change.
The problem hit people with paid accounts as well as free users.
Server Error (502) seems to come up from time to time. To pick an example, Google made similar posts on 2 December, and searching Gmail Help for Temporary Error (502) gets 47 results.
However, it hardly inspires confidence in "cloud computing" if urgent emails can't be accessed -- as happened this time to one Gmail user we know, due to fly to the US today. For companies, the results could be financially damaging.
One solution is to Go to Gmail | Settings | Forwarding and have every email copied to another address when it arrives: I use a Yahoo address for this purpose. It means I always have a backup -- though the back-up emails are not labelled or sorted into folders.
Another solution is to use your choice of desktop software to collect mail from Gmail, so that you have a back-up on your own hard drive. This is much faster and more efficient than using Google's web-based interface, so it's especially useful for people who get a lot of email. It also means you can work on email when you don't have an internet connection.
However, if Gmail is down you still can't send emails, unless you also have a different email account. The ability to handle multiple email accounts makes a separate email client a better option than Google Gears, which provides offline access to Gmail, and which is still at the experimental stage.
