A few days ago, Gmail servers hit another outage with the result that several users were unable to check their Gmail online. Immediately, as usual, several pundits started doubting the utility of having your email in the Cloud. Even Lifehacker debated the practice of backing up your Gmail in Outlook on your desktop. Actually, all you need to do is take a backup of your email in the cloud in another cloud. We tell you how !
Gmail provides you the option to auto-forward your incoming mail to any other address of your choice. So simply forward a copy of your incoming mail to a non Gmail account such as Yahoo Mail or Windows Live Hotmail and you are done.
As regards existing mail in your Gmail inbox, you can use the POP3 retrieval or mail fetcher feature provided by your alternate email service provider to import all your existing mail.
This way, anytime Gmail goes down, you can still check your mails in your alternate email service. Or even if your Gmail account gets hacked or you get locked out of your account for some reason, you will always have a backup online. Its highly improbable that Gmail and your other service provider will go down at the same time!
