It'll annoy people, and then alot of people won't bother using the service if they can't get any help?
If people expect ANYTHING in terms of reliability from a FREE service, they're fooling themselves. It's an illusion. Gmail can turn off tomorrow, delete all of your e-mail, not tell you, and it's your fault, not theirs.
Well if Gmail did close tomorrow they would be up for a lot of legal costs as part of the gmail contract is that they will provide 99.5% uptime and if they break that contract a lot of people would sue google. As it is people almost sued google when did went down for a few hours but google argued because it only effected 25% of the customers therefore they could be down 4 times the time mentioned on the contract. Lucky <blank>
See Mchl's post -- Google owes nothing to anyone.