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by corresation 4725 days ago
Most people would assume that this is nothing more than an administrative change on the account, with no long drawn out six hour process. And if there is an upgrade time required, it absolutely should have in-your-face warnings given the importance of email 24/7 for many organizations.

Even if we buy that this is more than an administrative change and it somehow moves to better hardware, this is a problem that I would think that Google would have built to a mostly transparent process -- at most long term archives are unavailable after a very brief initial migration, etc.
1 comments
bigiain 4725 days ago
That exactly the sort of assumption you can't afford to make if you've honestly got company-destroying problems if your email goes down for 6 or even 24hrs.

It's easy in hindsight, but I've seen that happen before, and I have no doubt that if you'd considered the risk and (perhaps ironically) googled for information, you too would have known about this.

On the other side of the coin (and perhaps the reason Google haven't cared enough to fix the problem), SMTP is nicely designed so as to not result in this sort of thing losing any mail - "well behaved" email systems will just queue and retry mail for 5 days if needed.

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corresation 4725 days ago
That exactly the sort of assumption you can't afford to make

Okay so what if the transition took five days? How about thirty days? In the absence of seemingly any warning information at all on this, how does one ever perform such a change?

Let's take it further -- what if adding a user took down your email for a month? That is just as rational as removing an artificial limit is ("Oh didn't you know? You pushed our global user database past the threshold so we had to migrate platforms"). How about if you send an email that you CC to ten people and that takes your email down for days?

If this wasn't an expected behavior, and is seemingly a mere administration change, there is no universe where it can be pinned on the user. Doubly obvious given the confused responses of customer service.

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bigiain 4725 days ago
Exactly my point. If you're making changes to mission-critical things, you need to have both reliable information on how long those changes will take, as well as rollback plans to cover the risk of things going wrong.

Randomly clicking things like "change my email system" buttons, then complaining afterwards that it didn't work how you expected is the sort of mistake most of us have made at least once.

Once you've suffered through those mistakes, you tend to view phrases like "expected behavior" and "seemingly a mere administration change" a lot more suspiciously.

If it's mission critical, don't "assume", don't "expect" - things are often not as they "seem". As they say "Trust, but verify." Yeah, Google (or Rackspace, or MessageLabs) will _presumably_ "get it right", but when the consequences of "presuming" are business-destroyingly-high, verify the presumptions first.

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