Don't take GMail or other blessings for granted

At this Thanksgiving time of year, we are supposed to reflect on things we take for granted. Don’t worry, I’m not going to start in on Thanksgiving. I just want to acknowledge that I tend to take some of my desktop tools for granted. Case in point this morning: don’t take your browser or you web mail for granted.

I admit that I have a lot going on in both Firefox and Gmail. This morning, trying out a combination of new Google labs settings for Gmail plus the Getting Things Done Firefox add-in, I suddenly and abruptly got logged out of Gmail. I got a polite, but unbelievably firm “locked out” message. For up to 24 hours!



Searching on user groups, I saw that some people once locked out wound up locked out for days at a time. And one person found that once unlocked, all old email was gone. I prepared for the worst—I submitted an email pleading my greediness and asking to be let back in. I looked at my alternatives. And decided to blog about it. I want to say that 3 hours later, I’m back in. In the meantime, I thought about some lessons. Much of this falls under the category of don’t take things for granted.

• Not taking things for granted begins with testing add-ins meticulously. I had modified my settings a few days ago, but not restarted Firefox. This morning, I added something else, restarted. Quite possibly the installation of both together into Gmail clashed and triggered the lock-out out. Add things one at a time, restart each time, and make sure the new thing tests in a clear environment.
• I often have a lot of Firefox tabs open. And sometimes, not seeing my Gmail or Google Calendar tab, I end up opening another. In the help pages, it says clearly that being logged in multiple places and switching active sessions can trigger a lock-out. I will not take Firefox’s stability for granted and be more careful about my tabs.
• Don’t add more add-ins to Firefox than you need. I love my add-ins and I am going to write something at some point about my favorite add-ins, but, hmm, not today.
• Have a back-up plan. This is probably the most important lesson. After using Eudora for years, trying out Outlook (I’m sure you have heard of it), I settled in on Thunderbird, which has been fine. In the last while, however, I have been testing Gmail to consider moving our email hosting there. Fortunately, all my webmail could still download to Thunderbird. I was able to confirm that even though I couldn’t open Gmail, Google still was faithfully, if more slowly, receiving and forwarding email to Thunderbird. Nothing wrong with that. If you rely on web mail, it makes sense to still have a POP or IMAP local account somewhere that backs everything up and that you can use in an emergency.
• Clear you cache once in a while. I do that in IE and Opera, but not in Firefox. Letting browser cache get all messed up is also mentioned as something that can contribute to triggering a lock-out.
• Be careful with beta software. Yes, look closely, almost everything beyond search you use from Google is still marked as beta. Gmail Beta, Documents Beta, Calendar Beta. Can’t a big company like Google get its big stuff out of Beta? And if not, be careful trusting critical organizational stuff there. At least have the alternatives and back-ups in place, as mentioned earlier.
• Be careful with software you can’t get support for. As I mentioned, I’m using Gmail a lot as an experiment. If you have a basic Gmail account, you have limited recourse if something goes wrong. Take that into account in your planning. Only with the paid business or free nonprofit apps edition can you get phone support for “critical issues.”

So I’m back where I was, lessons often mentioned as general advice to others, now reinforced in my own case.