"safety" of gmail (was: Re: [clue-tech] Archives)

[Nate Duehr]

Collins Richey wrote:

> Actually, as it turns out, I have a fair number of the mails going
> back to 09/05/04. All of these are in my gmail account, so I would
> need to figure out how to get them into an mbox file. I know that
> gmail has a pop3 retrieval function, but the only active mail account
> that I have is my wife's account on comcast. There's no hurry with my
> contribution, since the mails are safe on gmail.

This will probably start a side-thread, so I'll change the topic but 
reply to the thread...

What makes you think gmail is "safe"?

There was some interesting publicity recently about some poor guy that 
had his account accidentally deleted.  Google's official reply was, 
"Sorry, gmail is still in Beta!  See ya!"  He had what he described as 
"very important" e-mails in his gmail account.

Many of us do, I'm sure.

Seriously -- gmail's a nifty tool, but saying that your important mail 
or data in someone else's hands is "safe" without a contract stating how 
they're going to back it up and how fast they will recover it... isn't a 
good habit to get into.

I keep toying with the idea of dropping running my own servers -- and 
just using my ISP or public resources like Google's.  My servers are a 
bit of a pain most days... (read: spam filters) but... they're mine.

And I know what the backup schedule is... and I know where the backups 
are... and my ISP doesn't have any legal requirements to keep all my 
e-mail for a set period of time after I delete it (that's coming...)... 
and... I dunno.  I guess I like that, for the time being.

Plus nowadays it feels so "old-school" to run your own stuff, but I'd 
also miss my customized IMAP server that I've had set up for years, 
which most ISP's still don't really do... being able to fire up a copy 
of Thunderbird or mutt on ANY machine and have all my mail for the last 
X number of years available to me is... nice.

So for the moment, it's probably worth the headache.  Not so sure the 
blog is worth it much anymore -- the blog comment and trackback spam is 
completely out of control, but tools installed to deal with it seem to 
be working -- for now.

Nate