Comment by tehwalrus
10 years ago
"How is it that desktop mail clients are less reliable than gmail...?"
Made me chuckle. I've been told off by a former Googler colleague enough times now to have learned that Gmail is more complex than anyone imagines on a first guess, in order to be "reliable".
It is certainly the google service that I use the most. In a decade of quite heavy usage I remember one outage of a 1-2 hours (with no data loss). To me this is the gold standard that the rest of us should aspire to. :)
Lately (last year or so) I've started to notice substantial data loss. Either old mails completely missing or large mails being truncated (destroying inline images f.ex.)
So to anyone relying on gmail for safe keeping: Don't.
> Lately (last year or so) I've started to notice substantial data loss. Either old mails completely missing or large mails being truncated (destroying inline images f.ex.)
Please write to support and ask them to investigate. I used to work on the Gmail backend team, so I know bug reports regularly make it through support to an engineer. I also know they take data integrity quite seriously and have a variety of tools to investigate (potential) problems, both proactively and in response to user complaints such as yours. They also keep redundant copies of everything.
I get the opposite problem: stuff I delete periodically comes back. Google has less incentive to fix that due to their business model. ;)
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No offense (I have no idea who you are and how much you know), but...
Do you feel you are you competent enough (in e.g. SMTP and MIME) to distinguish between MIME-encoded base64 inline images (super rare) and references to images on external web sites (a lot more common)? Which in the case of old web sites are quite likely to stop working if you revisit old mails.
Did you make the effort to verify that it was the first type when you witnessed this?
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Interesting that none of the cited software uses maildir.
Breaking a mbox is an extremely simple thing, as the format leaves no possibility of error checking, parallel writing, rewriting lost data, or anything else.
Outlook's mail folders are marginally better, allowing for error detection, but really, that's a lame first paragraph for introducing a great article.