Google’s Mail, Gmail, is best free service, more reliable than Hotmail or Yahoo. But it can have outages. It was out for a few hours this morning starting at 4:30AM EST, causing some people to call it “Gfail”.

According to the Google blog:

If you’ve tried to access your Gmail account today, [...]]]> Gmail is Offline

Google’s Mail, Gmail, is best free service, more reliable than Hotmail or Yahoo. But it can have outages. It was out for a few hours this morning starting at 4:30AM EST, causing some people to call it “Gfail”.

According to the Google blog:

If you’ve tried to access your Gmail account today, you are probably aware by now that we’re having some problems. Shortly after 10 9:30am GMT our monitoring systems alerted us that Gmail consumer and businesses accounts worldwide could not get access to their email.

We’re working very hard to solve the problem and we’re really sorry for the inconvenience. Those users in the US and UK who have enabled Gmail offline through Gmail Labs should be able to access their inbox, although they won’t be able to send or receive emails.

“Offline Gmail” can help

This should encourage people to either set up a mail client (i.e. Outlook, Thunderbird, Mac Mail), or begin using Offline Gmail though Gmail Labs’ Google Gears. This creates a local copy of all mail all within your browser so that you at least can see your old mail and draft new messages. Because it has your messages locally on your computer, it can make working with email faster too.

Offline Gmail Video from Google: