Will it ever NOT be possible? (Score 1)

I not only think it is possible to move to online operating systems, but think that eventually it could be required. It might take quite awhile, but eventually... Yeah. You have an equal (or greater) risk of corrupting your email archives in Outlook, Thunder Bird, Outlook Express, etc, and losing your mail. What about the very common Windows crash where you're stuck formatting your drive? Or, what about hard drive failure itself? There are about 27397139719 different ways a standard computer user can mess up their local mail systems. Then you have a good 2% (or less) of all people in the world who actually do backups... I fully believe and encourage web based applications, well beyond email. It is nice to know my email is on a server where if there is a power outage at my home, I can still access it with a laptop and wireless because Google is not going to have a power outage. It is nice to know that if my hard drive blows up, I can get my mail online. If my entire OS was that way, well, then great! I do think that a company like Google should be performing daily backups, or mirrored images of users email... So long as systems like that are in place, then why not take advantage of a web OS and web mail? Not sure what to think in this case, but accidents do happen. People lost e-mail. Nothing is perfect, and it happens every day, all over the world. If you're putting all your trust in computers, and your email is that critical - then BACK IT UP. G-mail makes this easy to accomplish. This has nothing to do with; "how far are we in terms of moving all communication online" - It has everything to do with technology, as a whole. It shows computers, and people, and yes, even god (Google) is not perfect. It shows that if you have critical information, then consider it as such and back it up.