Why (And How) Should I Back Up My Web-Based Email?

It wasn’t always this way, but I am a big fan of web-based email.  I realize that all email, to some extent, is web-based, but I am talking about dedicated web-based email services such as Yahoo and Google give. They charge nothing and give us more email storage space than most of us will ever be able to use. I am a fan of these email services mainly for two reasons. First is accessibility. I can go anywhere and use anyone’s computer and access my email. Second is reliability. Although I have had hard drives crash and have traded one computer for another many times my email is always there waiting for me. When I have to reload a customer’s computer and find out they are using Microsoft Outlook I get a sinking feeling in my stomach. I know that unless they have backed up their email, which most have not, they have lost, not just their years of email, but all their email addresses also. I immediately turn missionary and try to convert them to a Yahoo Mail, Gmail, or Hotmail email account. But just recently I have been made aware that I may have made too much of the reliability of web-based email.

Web-Based Email Is Safe, Right?
My clients who use Outlook who have lost their email usually have lost it due to hard drive failure, a really nasty virus that destroys data, or to user error where they have accidentally erased their data. They can’t restore their email from the email server because in almost all cases they have told the server to erase email that has been downloaded (usually by default). These are things I have never heard of happening on Yahoo, Google, or MSN. But even if hardware failure is not a concern for the security of email storage I have learned that hackers are. That Atlantic recently ran a story about a woman whose Gmail account was hacked.(Read it here: http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/11/hacked/8673/) She was able to regain control of her email account, but found out that the hacker had erased all 7 years of her saved email. This was a tremendous blow to her and her business. This woman and her journalist husband (who knows important people) visited with Google engineers and learned that thousands of email accounts are hijacked not yearly, not monthly, but daily. To anyone who depends upon their Yahoo or Gmail email accounts this is alarming. It has knocked me out of my stupor of web-based email as being the ultimate service for accessibility and security.

How to Secure My Email
Since learning this I have rethought my position on web-based email. I still prefer the convenience of a web-based email account, but rather than turning up my nose at computer based email such as Outlook or Thunderbird, I have expanded my viewpoint to include them. I still need to access my email from any one of several different computers and my smart phone. But how do I secure my web-based email from being lost by hackers? Of course the first thing is to use a very strong password. That will help, but is anything but certain. The second thing is to back up my email.  I know of updates that allow Outlook users to backup their email.  To my knowledge there is no “backup” feature on Yahoo Mail, Gmail, or Hotmail. Yet backing up web-based email is relatively simple if imperfect. You can use Outlook if you own Microsoft Office to download your web-based email or you can use the free Thunderbird. Before you download email make sure you check the “Leave a copy of messages on the server,” otherwise your email will be removed from the server immediately and you will not have a backup (Click here to see how). Additionally your email will then exist on your computer and no longer be accessible on the web. The web-mail interface is still my main interface since I am always jumping from computer to computer, but I will open Outlook at the end of each day on my main computer so it will download a copy of all incoming email.

Not Perfect
This is not a perfect backup solution for a couple of reasons. First, Outlook only downloads what is in my “Inbox.” I have about thirty folders where I have sorted mail over the years. Because the mail was already in these folders before I started using Outlook as a backup the items in these folders are not backed up. I have it from a reputable source that Thunderbird will download the email in your folders and not just your inbox. This is definitely a "plus" on the side of Thunderbird. Another issue is that when Outlook downloads the mail my web-based interface shows the mail as “read” (non-bolded). This is definitely a bit of an annoyance. When weighed with the other options--having email accessible only on one computer or using web-based email and not having a backup—I find these annoyances as marginally acceptable.

Take It Up a Notch
I believe it is time for web-based email hosts to take it up a notch. When I worked for a mid-sized company we used Outlook exclusively and kept backups of our email files. Now that I am a small business man I do not have access to those kinds of resources and rely on web-based email for my business. I would like see a more matured way of securing email from hacking attacks. I want to know that I can get my email back should my email account be compromised. Perhaps I am asking a lot from a free service. I would even be willing to pay a reasonable amount for this email “backup” service. I can see that this backup service would quickly expand to cover things like Google Docs and other cloud-based data.

When Troubleshooting A Computer Enters the Twilight Zone

I have fixed hundreds of computers since I got into the computer maintenance business. Much of computer repair work is routine. Then again, much is not. In fact, I have seen so many strange occurrences that I cannot explain that it scares me. Sometimes I sense a little superstition within me born of these inexplicable computer behaviors--computer hauntings, if you will. I have to disperse these superstitions because they just don't have place in a computer technician. We must use logic and proven troubleshooting techniques to resolve computer problems! But I think every computer technician can tell you stories that defy logic. The story I am about to tell is one of these.

Company A purchased a telecommunication switching system from Company B. At any given time of the day or night hundreds of phone calls were wending their way through the computer circuits of that switch. A few weeks after the installation of this very expensive computer (six figures) Company A's technician noticed in the logs that the switch would reset itself over night. It takes a bit of time for this switch to recover from a reboot so not only are all current calls terminated, but no new calls can begin. This was serious malfunction to Company A. Company B got their second level technical support right on this problem. However, they could find no indication of the situation that caused the resets. The resets continued to occur each night usually around 11:00. Of course they checked power issues, but there were no other power issues reported in the building or switch room. Company A was was displeased with the performance of the switch they had paid so much for and demanded a resolution. The problem was escalated to the designing engineers. They dove into the problem fully confident that they could get this resolved. They studied all the core dump logs to find nothing. The logs indicated everything was running perfectly and then suddenly a system-wide reset would occur. This was not happening with any other of their switches in any other location. They swapped out power supplies. Reset. They swapped out memory. Reset. They swapped out circuit boards. Reset. The reloaded software. Reset. What made the troubleshooting so difficult was that they had to make a change and then wait overnight to see if it was effective. Company A's impatience increased and it was clear something positive had to happen soon.

The engineer's of Company B could not understand what the problem was. They were at wit's end. It was as if the switch was in another space-time continuum where physics do not work the same. Out of desperation one engineer was sent to the switch site to sit up and watch the switch one night. The reset always occurred around 11:00 so he know when to be watchful. This troubleshooting technique is not usually effective in a computer. Computer problems normally occur in the virtual world where the naked human eye cannot see. But desperation drove this highly educated engineer to do the illogical--sit and watch the exterior of a computer to see if he could learn anything about what was going on inside.

He entered the room about 9:00 pm, brought up some monitoring screens, and then took a seat and stared at metal and silicon. The air conditioning made it chilling and all the fans in the computers created a sleepy din on his ears. 11:00 pm came and his expectations were disappointed when nothing happened. The switch kept purring along. At 11:30 he was tired and was just about ready to go back to his hotel when the door opened and a cleaning lady came with a vacuum cleaner. This was not a typical switch room and a part of it was carpeted. Curious, the engineer watched the cleaning woman. In a hurry to get her job done she ignored him. She went straight to the electrical sockets where the switch was plugged in and unplugged the switch to make room to plug her vacuum cleaner in. The mystery was solved.

Traditional logic does not always hold the keys to solving computer problems. Desperation will lead to some very creative troubleshooting techniques. Insanity is often defined as doing the same thing again and again, but expecting different results. More than once we have fixed a frustrating computer problem by applying the insanity method. At first you go through the troubleshooting logically marking each thing you have tried. When the problem doesn't fix you sometimes try previously tried items again. That doesn't always logically make sense, but eventually we get the problem fixed. Clearly something must have changed while repeating procedures, but we don't always know what it was. But if it is fixed and stays fixed I'm willing to put a mark in the victory column.

I Miss the PC Golden Age

I can still remember buying my first PC. I was in college. I had already written a couple of term papers on a type writer. The problem with a typewriter was that I wasn’t accurate in typing and correcting errors was a real chore. Eventually I found my way to the writing lab in the Humanities building where they had a Macintosh computer. I was dazzled by how easy it was to make corrections and by fonts. Oh, the fonts were so fun. I wrote a letter home to my Mom using every font available. I know I wasn’t the first or last to do that.

Finally the IBM compatible computer became available at a price I could afford and I went out and bought one. It was an 8088 that could run at speeds of up to 8 Mhz. It had two 5.25” floppy drives, 640 KB of RAM. It had no hard drive. What an exciting day that was for me. I used that computer as a typewriter replacement. I had WordPerfect and typed all my papers on it. That was all. At the time I didn’t really know what else you could do with it. It sounds pretty boring, but actually that computer was more exciting to me than my current quad core with 8 GB of RAM.

I remember spending over $200 to upgrade to almost a megabyte of RAM. Spending that money was extravagant, but I ran into a program that demanded it and I had no choice. I remember buying my first sound card and being so thrilled with the midi sounds my computer could make. I remember my first CD-ROM player. It was an external and played at the original 1x speed.  I put in an encyclopedia disk and listed to Patrick Stewart say, “Welcome to” [pause as data buffered] “the exciting world of” [pause as data buffered] and this went on and I was patient and excited. My first hard drive was 10 MB. I could hardly believe so much room could exist for storage. I had the x286 processor, the x386, and nearly died of happiness when I was able to get a x486.

Networking came along and I got a modem and an AOL account. I remember my first email address and hearing those wonderful words “You have mail!” One night, after hours at the office, I was blown away when I entered the world of Doom with a friend. There I was, in a virtual world, and I could see my friend in there and interact with him. We slaughtered monsters (and got slaughtered). I wondered if Heaven could be as wonderful as that experience.

Those years were the Golden Years for personal computers. There was always some new development just around the corner that made such a difference in the personal computing world that even a regular computer user just had to have it. But all golden ages throughout history have one thing in common—they come to an end. PC technology finally grew up and lost that “what’s next?” excitement.  I’m not sure exactly when this happened, but I believe it started during the Microsoft XP era.  I remember buying a brand new Vista computer. It was my first dual-core processor and I mistakenly thought it was going to smoke my old Pentium 4 computer. I was wrong. It actually seemed slower and more error prone.  One reason for this was that they sold me the computer with 1 GB of ram in it when Vista really needs at least 2 GB to run. The other reason was that the pre SP1 Vista was buggy. I still have that computer five years later and it is running fine (upgraded to Win 7). Although I have newer computers at home I also have very active older computers still running Pentium 4 processors and Windows XP. In my shop I am constantly fixing computers that are five years old or older. It is this that tells me that the original golden age of computers is over. Back in the 80’s and 90’s I was buying new computer every year because I had to in order to run the newer programs. Now that PCs have matured a five-year-old machine can run this year’s software releases (except for some of the high end games). Yes, you can go out and buy PCs that are far more powerful than the five year old PCs, but they don’t seem to make that much difference in your day-to-day computing experience. Although this situation saves me money, I look nostalgically to those earlier, more exciting days of the PC.

Perhaps all is not lost. It seems that we are entering a PC revival. Well, not really a PC revival, but a computing revival.  Although PCs themselves are not making waves in anymore, the PC alternatives or what I call PC extenders, are. We are now in the age of mobility. The excitement of desktop PCs was replaced by the laptop. The excitement of the laptop was replaced by the extremely portable netbook. The excitement of the netbook has been replaced by the tablet and the smart phone. Ultrabook technology is lurking around the edges of the limelight. What all this means is choices for the average computer user. And choices mean excitement—at least a little. I still rely heavily on a desktop PC. However my laptop sees a lot of use too. I have a netbook that goes on house calls with me. I also have a tablet that travels around the house a lot. In my pocket I carry a smartphone that is a real workhorse.  I am having fun again reading about the latest in each of these areas and find a little excitement in trying to figure out how much difference some of these new gadgets will make in my life. But still, none of these things makes my heart beat as fast as the day I got my first one gigabyte hard drive.