It’s not the biggest shock in the world but it is becoming a bit of a regular annoyance; Google Mail has gone down again.

We reported at the end of February that the service seemed to be having some problems, and then again a week or so into March, but since then it’s been plain sailing – until now.

Once again the service is currently unavailable OK, so it has just popped back online again which is a relief to many we’re sure, 113 million or so all told, but it does make us wonder that if the mail giant is having a few problems keeping up with demand for its service.

It certainly isn’t doing wonders for people’s faith, ultimately, when it comes to email what people want and need is a reliable service time after time – and to Google’s credit this is what we get mostly, but it’s a worrying recurrence of a situation 3 times in less than 3 months.

Thankfully at least it wasn’t a long outage this time, but it certainly was on the last couple of occasions – and who knows, it may well be next time.

This doesn’t necessarily mean that I’m looking to change my webmail provider but if they keep it up I may well be.

If you’re in the market for other email alternatives you can check out some of the competition below:

• Yahoo
• Hotmail
• ZenBe (from $5.99 per month)
• Zimbra

For now, I’m sticking with Gmail; but don’t push me Mountain View!