and if you cut the spam, you could lose half the servers

And if you go back seven or eight years to when they ran on Sun boxes instead of Windows machines, you could lose a few more servers.

gmail seems unavailable several times a day. Is this a web2 app scale issue or just not a priority for google.

I’m currently in South-east Asia and HotMail doesn’t seem to work more than - at best - a few times a week. I’m not a user myself, but meeting people all the time who are more than a little exasperated and desperate. I don’t know if it’s Hotmail’s technology or blocking from local ISPs. It’s the same in several countries, though.