CareerCup

Q: How would you know whether a website like gmail or yahoomail is reliable?

A: They are reliable because I know neither is operated by Microsoft.

1 Likelyhood of email getting delivered:
Multiple test cases - single reciever, multiple reievers, various domain addresses, various combinations of bcc, cc

2 Negative testing
Invalied reciever(s), Invalied addresses

3 Single Sign On (SSO)features

4 Multiple Session Features

5 Was the server down longer or shorter time

6 Email functionality
Time taken to send, recieve, attachments (send & recieve), long emails, short emails, auto save features, archive, grouping emails, draft save etc

7 Chat support
Basic chatting, multiple users, inegration with chat and email

8 Load Testing
Too many sends, recieves, chats, attachments etc

9 Exceptions
No send address - Send shd be inactive
No Subject/Body - Warning Message
Too many addresses, Too large email
Multiplicity of single reciever in the same email
gmail does nt let you send .exe files as attachment
Various file formats for attachements

we'll it depends upon the definition and context in which "reliable" word is used...
1) if you mean its secure, as sandeep said check if the session is HTTPS or not... also check if the cookies are stored and does jump from one browser to another permits you to directly login or you have to put in the password and re-login
2) If you mean "UPTIME", then a recent report mentioned that yahoo search engine was down only for 1 minute throughout the year whereas google was down for 5 minutes or someting...

but in an interview, i would suggest to go with the answer pertaining to security...
nice question btw

good question.
waiting for answers...

I suppose this has to do with the protocol used.
HTTPS is secure, so if a site uses https for login pages then we can say its reliable.

Copy the url once u r logged in and paste the url in another browser. U shud be redirected to tthe login page.

Anti phishing measures user specific images.

I think reliable can also mean "what is the likelyhood of your email getting lost?"

To identify if a site is secure or not there are certain guideline

1) Look for HTTPS which means SSL is enabled.
2) Look if an yellow padlock appears at the bottom of the browser(In case of IE). I guess this is implemented in different ways for different browser.
3) Check for the digital certificate of the site.
4) Check if the certificate is verfied by a well known certification authority like verisign & twarte.

As maddynator and nachiketa already said- it depends on how you define reliability and reliability from whose perspective- the provider, user, an organization.
Let's say we are seeing reliability from a user perspective to him email should be send, received quickly, can attach, find email conversations, secure, spam free, key board shortcuts, accessibility, does not mix with others emails, nor show wrong statuses, report errors when there are etc..
From the provider's perspective (say hotmail wants to compare)- this should be highly data driven, what is the time that server is down, what is the time that users are not able to access email, what % of users get affected, what is the downtime between upgrades, how many security breaches, disk space problems, how much time before a sign in expires, how adherent is it to privacy policy, what kind of ads are shown and how relevant they are... etc.
For an organization that's evaluating which system to use (Exchange vs google apps)- what is the promised uptime, what are the cost benefits, SLA's, disk space, integration with other apps, spam protection, security standards, how compliant to policy of the company, email retention capabilities, administrative facilities, disaster recovery, performance during peak times or virus, backups etc..

huh