Many may remember the morning of Tuesday, September 2, as a time when Gmail had an OOPS. How did you deal the Gmail failure? Do you have a backup plan for accessing your email if this happens again? The outage on the Gmail servers was a surprise to users and even the Gmail technical team.
According to the Gmail Blog, it was unexpected because their infrastructure runs on servers in multiple locations around the world. It was even reported that their server plan was recently updated to so that a crash such as that happened wouldn’t happen.
However it did happen and …read more

If you are a frequent Gmail user, Tuesday was likely a frustrating day for you. Due to a maintenance mishap, Gmail was down for more than an hour. Google says that the outage affected just about everyone — including individuals and businesses who pay for a premium version of Gmail.
During a routine maintenance, Google took some of their servers offline. However, when they did that, they underestimated the stress that act would have on their other servers. The result was a giant headache for everyone involved.
Google apologized for the Gmail outage and says that they have taken steps to make …read more

The video above shows an interview of efficiency expert Julie Morgenstern saying that you shouldn’t check email in the morning. Although others have suggested this, including Tim Ferriss, I can’t say I’ve successfully tried it to the point that it was permanent.
How often do you check email? Do you find any difference in your productivity when you check your email first thing in the morning when you get to work?

This is part 2 of “How I Freed Myself from Mountains of Email“.
After killing off spam and miscellaneous notifications, I did a few more things that are helping me get less email everyday.
Modified Email Rules and Alerts. Incoming mail is now organized based on criteria I set such as the sender (is it a client? relative? affiliate network?) and these criteria help me file email in the proper folders and deal with them there. If, at any given time, I just want to focus on one thing (replying to relatives, greeting clients, or invoicing), I just go to the …read more

Image by Lusi, taken from stock.xchng

“One of the effects of living with electric information is that we live habitually in a state of information overload. There’s always more than you can cope with.” – Marshall McLuhan
Too much email can cause insanity. If you think information overload is restricted to your email server and client, you’re either mistaken or a much freer person than I am. Emails, whether they’re spam or not, take up so much of our time – from checking to reading and the thoughts and worries that linger after reading them.
The truth is, I’ve had enough. …read more

How to keep your inbox squeaky clean. A video presentation from Merlin Mann of 43Folders.