Yesterday Gmail was down for a short period of time though to some it was an eternity. We recommend Google Apps (with Gmail) to a lot of clients due to the incredible reliability, unbeatable price (free for most purposes) and normally near 100% up-time.  Due to the mayhem that ensued across the blogosphere we decided to run some internal backups so we have a fallback in case Gmail ever explodes or disappears suddenly, which would probably have more adverse affects on the economy than on our petty email threads.

If you use Gmail for your primary email provider I would suggest scheduling your own backup if you do not already do so. Lifehacker.com has a great tutorial to get you started on a Windows machine as well as a Linux-based machine (you can just follow the command line steps to configure and run fetchmail). Better safe than sorry.

As an aside - does anyone know of a PHP-based script that can accomplish this same task? Being a Web developer it would be great to run this from our Web server without installing Cygwin.