Is free worth what you pay for it?

(Update: I was able to get into gmail about 5 minutes after I posted this.)

I'm officially off today, but I just had to comment on today's gmail failure.

I and several family members use gmail for personal email. I love it. But, despite that, I've persistently advocated against moving organizational email to gmail. Don't get me wrong, there is a lot to like about gmail for a cash strapped organization with a relatively small staff. And, if google gives you a free educational or enterprise Apps account as a nonprofit, there is even more to like. But, there are issues.

Google is pretty good about keeping people posted on what's going on, but this post: Official Gmail Blog: Today's Gmail problems doesn't really tell us much. for someone who is trying to keep an organization going, the lack of information is almost as bad as the fact that email has been down most of the day. I don't remember the last time our email servers were down this long, except possibly the blackout that took out the entire city (and at that point it didn't make that much of a difference, because most of the people who needed to access it, couldn't anyway because their internet access was down). But, in every one of the (very few) outages we've had over the last few years, the main question I keep getting from people is "when is email coming back up?" Most people are ok with a relatively short outage if they have a good idea of how long it's going to last so they can schedule themselves. If they can continue to read the emails that have already come in, and write their response or new emails, knowing that those mails will go out when the system comes back up, so much the better.

These outages, which are rare but often enough to be a real concern, are not the only issue I have with gmail. But, this is an issue that you can mitigate. If you look at the blog post I've linked to, you will notice that the web front end is down, but IMAP and POP access are still up. This is not the first time I have seen this happen. So, if you are using gmail, you can set up either IMAP or POP (or both), so that you have a better chance of being able to continue with email use while the Gmail front end is down. The only thing I would strongly suggest if you use the POP setup, is to set it up so that read messages stay on the server. This allows people to continue to access their email from multiple locations without synchronizations issues. It also gives you much better backup of email than you are likely to have on individual computers in your organization.

It's always worth periodically re-evaluating your infrastructure decisions. If and when you give a serious look at using gmail as your email platform, remember the adage that "free stuff is worth what you pay for it." That is not always true, for sure. And gmail is not junk either. But, it serves to remind us that "free" stuff may have other costs. As a decision maker or influencer, it is your job to look at all of the costs and trade-offs and decide what is the best for your organization. Just be prepared, if you decide against google, to justify it (to your board and others with a legitimate right to ask.) In a tight economy, free is very, very attractive.