alexpgp | Surprise! Server is down...

The last update at the FastMail status blog (maybe I should bookmark it?) was about 6-1/2 hours ago, stating that a file system check was taking longer than expected and not to expect access to accounts today.

That's twice in what? ten months?

It seems way too often to me, but I have nothing to compare it to.

There was some buzz yesterday about Google starting YABP (yet another beta program) which involves Google hosting business email under the company domain name (instead of gmail.com), and I did find an article at ZDNet on it, which I read to see if it mentioned anything about confidentiality (recall that Google data mines gmail content).

The article held no such information, but one of the comments - the first, in fact - asked all the questions that were bubbling in the back of my mind, plus some:

Now, let's look at the premise: assuming I would outsource my email, why would I outsource it to Google, of all companies? Google is a company that makes some of its living by data mining their users' email. So I should stick my company's email on there as well? Google is a company that never gets anything out of beta. Do I want my email to be running on a beta quality system? Google is a company that loves to log EVERYTHING and then keep those logs FOREVER, just waiting for the Feds to show up with a subpoena. Does my company need that kind of headache? Will Google even bother telling me if our emails are subpoenaed? Will Google follow my company's policies regarding destruction of sensitive data, or will it all be backed up somewhere? What about HIPAA, and information in that email?

I've gone the in-house (literally) route, and that's too much work; outsourcing has its problems as well. There's nothing to do in the immediate future, unless FastMail simply goes belly up.

Cheers...