There's an article you can read about Phil Katz' life here, entitled "The short, tormented life of computer genius Phil Katz". The poor bloke had a pretty rough life.

Then he was found dead April 14, Phil Katz was slumped against a nightstand in a south side hotel, cradling an empty bottle of peppermint schnapps. The genius who built a multimillion-dollar software company known worldwide for its pioneering "zip" files had died of acute pancreatic bleeding caused by chronic alcoholism.

Yeah, it seems broken at the moment. It was working fine a few hours ago when I visited the page after reading this article on a different source. Google's cache version seems riddled with errors.

This is exactly why it's important to keep backups. Gmail Backup is a pretty straightforward way to back up your Gmail account. You can also use it to upload emails from one account into another.