Are you banging your head on the keyboard because Gmail is not accessible? Your mail are not available to you? Actually they are. I was able to access my emails during the Gmail down time, when everyone was complaining I was able to access my emails over IMAP. The only difference was that I wasn’t accessing them via Gmail web interface but but by using the third party email client. All you need to do is install a third party client on your computer and enable IMAP in your Gmail settings. If you are using windows the chances are you alrea.