So, with all respect and much gratitude, please unsubscribe this address from all lists immediately and permanently. Note that all messages sent by blacklisted addresses are deleted without reading, although a copy of all requests such as this one are retained in the event that we ever need to make fun of you in front of lots of powerful, influential people for not doing the simple, and very civil thing we’ve requested.

via kung fu grippe · No. Let ME reach out to YOU!.

In reviewing how I spend large chunks of my time, I still spend more time than is truly productive dealing with various types of communications. It struck me that I hadn’t really established an expectation for how I will respond to communications so I am constantly checking all of them.

So here is how people get in touch with me, and here is what you can expect.

The goal here is to get to a schedule of looking at all the different sources on a regular but not excessive basis. Presence based services (IM and in Person) are the most immediate. Phone is immediate but not reliable – not always someone at the other end. Voicemail gets checked every couple hours and email gets check 4-5 times a day.

That really should be enough.

Here’s what happened: This morning (Pacific Time) we took a small fraction of Gmail’s servers offline to perform routine upgrades. This isn’t in itself a problem — we do this all the time, and Gmail’s web interface runs in many locations and just sends traffic to other locations when one is offline.

However, as we now know, we had slightly underestimated the load which some recent changes (ironically, some designed to improve service availability) placed on the request routers — servers which direct web queries to the appropriate Gmail server for response. At about 12:30 pm Pacific a few of the request routers became overloaded and in effect told the rest of the system “stop sending us traffic, we’re too slow!”.

Complete description via Official Gmail Blog: More on today’s Gmail issue.