Labor & Employment Law

The Case for Standby Email Accounts

By Dobin & Jenks

We have our office email domain, Dobinjenks.com and I have a multitude of personal addresses. The most frequent non-business email address I use is my Gmail account. I use the Gmail account for my personal email and I like the web interface design. And it's handy as a backup in case my main email domain is unavailable for some reason.

I was recently co-counsel with a friend of mine who was lamenting the remote access problems he was having with his mail server. Rather than try to redesign another firm's mail server (which I am equally capable of accomplishing or screwing up) I suggested a Gmail account to him. I sent him a Gmail invite and he was online with his new Gmail account in moments.

Shortly after we parted company, disaster struck. His regular email provider had a problem and he could not access external email. I learned this because he sent me an email from his Gmail account (should we call it a gmail?). He commented that the Gmail account was going to help him through the problem they were having.

The lesson learned here, of course, is the importance of having a backup. We always think about a backup as a tape drive or removable disk. But what if your office phone system dies? Can you get the calls redirected? What if the power goes out? Do you have a battery backup on your phone system to keep it alive during power disruptions? If your main email server goes down, do you have another means of getting emails? You do synchronize your address book to your laptop or some other device, right?

Google, by the way, is now marketing "Student" and "Professional" versions of its web applications suite. I don't think we'll be doing any heavy duty word processing with the Google word processor, but the overall product sure is tempting.

That's the view from The Law Planet - Jupiter, Florida.

Full post as published by The Law Planet Blog on October 01, 2007 (boomark / email).