On Monday, Google said it was having problems withGmail.com. This was not news to all its users. The blog said the problems were caused by a temporary outage in the contacts system that was preventing Gmail from loading properly.

Google claims it is conducting a full review of what went wrong and moving quickly to update its internal systems and procedures accordingly.

However, less than an hour ago, Argentina and Brazil started again having problems. This week’s problems were not the first time this has happened. A brief review of  the Google Apps Discussion Group shows an ongoing pattern of problems. Many users and system administrators complained loudly about the length of the outage and the lack of status update details offered by Google officials.

Today, several users are saying when they send email via Google SMTP from their desktop machine the mail does not deliver to the recipients. One user emailed this writer the following comment: It seems it was just a temporary glitch. In any case I'm getting sick of these hiccups.

Another problem is compounding Gmail's claimed offlines. Hackers are using a technique dubbed as Cache Poisoning that means visitors of any web site name can be sent to a rogue server on any other IP address. Users are increasingly paranoid these days when they find themselves unable to log-in to Gmail, especially considering the recent disclosed vulnerabilities in DNS servers which might lead to Cache Poisoning and the users' log-in credentials being redirected somewhere other than GMail's servers.

Today, the Google Apps Discussion Group says several users have done a “who is?” check for the owner of a domain name. For them, Google was not the owner of Gmail.com. That raises some odd questions as to what is happening at the local DNS servers.

Google, Salesforce.com, IBM, Amazon, Hewlett-Packard and other major vendors are big backers of  'cloud computing' and the software-as-a-service (SaaS) model for delivering applications and computing resources via the Internet. Clearly, the Internet is a convenient tool most of the time.

But, when your email service goes off line for many hours, that is a big problem! Users and IT managers simply have to wait until unseen forces repair the problems.

As American cartoonist and social philosopher, Walt Kelly, first said in his 1971 cartoon strip, Pogo: We Have Met The Enemy and He Is Us.  X