This is your life on a server

Finally, what can you do if you have a problem with Webmail? For example, if your e-mails disappear.

That's what happened to Jeneane D. Sessum, a writer and consultant in Atlanta who uses Gmail and several other Google Web-based applications. Last November, a large chunk of the e-mail messages she had stored on Google's server simply disappeared. When she tried to contact Google support, she was directed to its online help forums. She couldn't find an answer there. Then she filled out a contact form to report a technical problem. In reply, she received a form e-mail saying that Google had determined that there was no outage or data problem that would have caused her e-mail to vanish. "That was it," says Sessum. "No advice on what to do." She had to work through her own personal network to reach an actual person at Google, someone in technical support. "But still nobody could tell me anything except that nothing was wrong on their end."

Sessum wishes Google could be more responsive, especially to users like her who are basing their small businesses on its platforms. "I don't buy this line that these are free services and so you get what you pay for," she says. "They make money off of me by serving ads up every time I send an e-mail." She says she'd gladly pay Google some type of premium fee that would get her better support and perhaps guaranteed backups of her e-mail.

Google's Grant won't discuss individual problems like Sessum's, citing user privacy. Google can sometimes restore deleted e-mail, she says, depending on how much time has passed. Ultimately, Google permanently deletes it, but she won't specify the amount of time that Google waits before doing that. "We must strike this balance between, on the one hand, keeping that e-mail around just in case of situations like this so that we could recover the e-mail for the user and, on the other hand, doing what the user has told us to do when they tell us to delete the e-mail," she says.

Tellingly, Sessum still uses Gmail and her other Google apps. Indeed, most users seem willing to accept the trade-offs in exchange for the features, usability and accessibility of these services. Sessum, for example, admits that she should have been more conscientious about keeping her own backup of her Gmails. Ironically, she's configured her Gmail account to forward a copy of everything to her Yahoo Mail. "So my backup to my Web-based e-mail is another Web-based e-mail account," she admits.

Tam Harbert is a Washington-based freelance journalist. Her last piece was Confessions of a Cobol programmer.