Dependency on Webmail

Today was like any other day, checking emails and sending emails, reading, browsing watching NBA highlights of the Sunday’s  games.

I was getting prepared to write an email and I needed to recall a address, so I did a respective search in GMAIL, which searches in all your emails (very good by the way). Suddenly I received an error in the screen, which surprised me a lot. Then I tried the search again and the same error. It was like a 705 error and mi request couldn’t be done.

Nothing was working so I closed the browser and then tried to login again, and got this error.

It was half and hour and the error continued, this was around 11:00 am Stockholm time. Then I realized how dependent I was on Webmail and if the service is down, I can’t retrieve any contacts or anything. If I was using a email client like thunderbird or outlook then at least I will have had my access to the contacts, write the email and send it. I will be able to send it because I’m guessing that the problem was on the webmail client, not on the services itself.

Yes GMAIL is BETA, but still we are dependent on companies that offer services for free that become a commodity and that we give for granted. So I’m worried of this trend (which is not getting so much hype this days but.. ) of Software as a Service (SaaS). It may sound paranoiac, but if some day Google out of the blue decides to do something drastic with its services, are we protected? Do we have a backup? Those the agreement we just accept without reading protects us ?