Posted by Brian McCullough
Hopefully, not too many of you were affected by the email system outages yesterday. Hopefully, you weren’t also affected by the FPL power outages.
It’s a reminder to all of us that depending on one system alone works fine, right up until the time that it doesn’t. In this case, commercial email services were affected, but the next time it could be your server at work.
Fortunately, it’s easy these days to create backup email accounts. They’re free, easy to setup and they can sit there waiting for you when you need them. In a worst case scenario, you just jump over to your free web account and send out notices that your normal email is down temporarily.
I have two Gmail accounts, a Yahoo account and even a Hotmail account I haven’t visited in years. Whenever my work email goes down, I can transition over to those with no problems whatsoever.
The key to quick transitions, I’ve found, is to keep local copies of all emails. I route my email accounts through Outlook so there are hard copies of everything just in case. I even do this with my Gmail accounts.
Of course, the inverse also works. You can easily set up a Gmail account to forward copies of all messages to other accounts for backup purposes. Some people even route their mail through Gmail and then back again, to weed out spam, and to keep copies.
But even if you don’t go to such lengths, the key to surviving downtimes is to make sure you have copied your address book over to all your email accounts. After all, it’s no good to be back up in email if you can’t remember anyone’s email address to alert them to your situation
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