Yes, and if my data disappeared tomorrow, I'd be pretty pissed off. But since Gmail has a sort of critical mass, it would be likely that other people would lose data too.
You're picturing some massive server failure, but not the more likely case of your Google account being disabled for any random reason, which has happened to more than a few people. As Gmail gains more users, you become that much less important to them.
I still believe the chance of Google losing or preventing access to my data is much lower than the chance of me accidentally screwing up my own server and finding out my backups don't work. It's a huge amount of work to get anywhere close to the reliability of GMail. You have to maintain the server, secure it, test backups, verify backups and deal with every security or maintenance issue that comes up.
It's a trade-off, and one I've come down on the side of GMail for.
As long as it's in Google's interest to provide such an outstanding service to their users, yes, that particular billion-dollar Top Coder champion-filled company will do a better job of managing a mail server than you and I combined.
Agreed. Another compelling reason is data deletion -- accidental or malicious. While catastrophic loss due to hardware seems to have declined over the past few years, malicious deletion has gone up markedly.
I've pimped them out before, but this is why I set up backupify (handle more than just gmail, since your Google password is for all your Google accounts) and periodically export my data. I just wish they did more, like backup my Dropbox and Atlassian accounts.
If there isn't much that you are worried about losing, you can just save a local copy from your browser. I only do that with a few per month, but it works fine with no extra fiddling.
IMAP is just a protocol. You're talking about syncing over IMAP. You can just fetch over IMAP too.
Also, POP3 is not folder-aware. You can only access your inbox over POP3. If you want to backup anything (e.g. drafts, sent mail, etc), then you need more than POP3.
Actually do. Since he's using getmail, its making a copy to his local system. It just happens to be able to do that over IMAP. You are better off doing this than doing the same with POP because Gmail's POP deletes mails as you read them, which is non-standard. You could lose emails if there are network, disk, or other errors.
gmail's POP server doesn't delete mail. What it does do is disappear them from the POP listing (ignoring any client "leave messages on server" config), although even this is resettable through the web interface.
Ok you're right about it not deleting by default. But there is an option to delete mail after its been accessed with POP. And in any case Gmail hides the message after you've read it, but you could still have an error writing the message to disk and thus miss backing that message up.
Something like that happened to me - my account (everything, not only Gmail) was suddenly inaccessible. However, a quick email to support and within 12 hours they sent me a link where I entered three emails I wrote to recently... that's it, password reset, account reactivated... I think they're getting better at handling these situations.
> You're picturing some massive server failure, but not the more likely case of your Google account being disabled for any random reason, which has happened to more than a few people. As Gmail gains more users, you become that much less important to them.
"more than a few" is probably still in the ten-thousandths of percentage points if that. Some can't, but I can live with those odds.
And as Gmail gets more users, I'm guessing the odds get even better, particularly with so many of these new users being tied to Android. Google has a lot tied up with making sure things don't go south.
You're picturing some massive server failure, but not the more likely case of your Google account being disabled for any random reason, which has happened to more than a few people. As Gmail gains more users, you become that much less important to them.