Would it be a tragedy if you lost your email?

This is not a good way to start the new year: Some Hotmail users report missing e-mails. The article starts with:

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"Please help me get them back," wrote one user under the moniker 'Zacgore' in a post dated Saturday. "All my kids' info and pictures are in there!"

Others complain that the majority of the e-mail in their inboxes was sent to their deleted mail folders instead. It is unclear from the posts how widespread the problem is. The free Web-based e-mail service is the world's most used with about 360 million users globally, according to comScore Inc.
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Today many of us use free email services like GMail, Yahoo, Hotmail and so on. The price is right. And in general the service is fine. But there is a risk you might lose your email. Would that be a problem? For most of us, yes!


I'm kicking around a solution and wondered what other people thought of it. Much of my private email goes through a GMail account. GMail has an option to forward the email and still keep the original.

This is what we do for the Carnival of Homeschooling. All the entries goes through a GMail account and are forwarded to the host for the current week. This way if there is a problem I can wade into the emails. So far we've only had one type of problem. Every once in awhile a host's spam filter will block an entry to the carnival. I go into the GMail account and dig it out.

So I am thinking of something similar. While Google is a pretty solid company and I expect they are trying to provide perfect service, there is a chance my GMail account might have troubles. Hotmail is run by Microsoft, which I am sure was trying to provide perfect service.

My solution is to enable the forwarding feature on my GMail account to a second service, like Yahoo, while keeping the original email in my GMail account. That way anything sent me to my GMail account would automatically be backed up. The odds of two major email services having trouble at the same time are pretty low.

Does anyone see a problem with this approach?