Tag Archives | E-Mail

[UPDATE AS OF 2:30PM TECHNOLOGIZER TIME: Gmail is back up, at least for me.]

Gmail is not feeling well today. I know because it’s the talk of Twitter. I know because an old Technologizer story happens to be Google’s first result for “gmail down.” Most of all, I know because both my primary work and personal e-mail accounts are on Gmail, and both are giving me an ugly Server Error right now.

I’m not sure how long this has been going on, but it continues as I write this, and it’s not a momentary blip–it’s an extended outage that appears to be affecting much if not all of Gmail’s users. I’m engaging in a little self-flagellation at the moment, since I’ve placed so much trust in Gmail (despite prior evidence it’s not perfect) that I don’t even use its IMAP capabilities to download mail via a traditional client. When Gmail’s not available, neither is my mail. (And important stuff it contains, such as the dial-in info for a conference call I’m supposed to be joining shortly.)

Sweeping Gmail blackouts remain relative rarities, but I’ve been increasingly frustrated with the service’s reliability recently. It often conks out on me temporarily, or behaves so slowly that it might as well be unavailable–and while the cause remains mysterious, I’ve experienced the same symptoms on multiple browsers on different PCs on a variety of networks.

Just this morning, I was soberly considering whether it was time to regretfully move on to something I might find less flaky. I’m still thinking that over, but today’s meltdown has convinced me that at the very least I need to be downloading my messages. I’m a mostly-happy Google freeloader, but the Gmail I’ve been using of late simply isn’t reliable enough to run a business on.

Which brings up today’s T-Poll:

Final note: Google has blogged about the downtime, and says that if you’ve already set up POP or IMAP access it should continue to work. It also says it’s looking into what’s going on and hopes to have more news soon. Once everything’s fixed, I hope very much that it errs on the side of telling us exactly what happened, even if it’s dry and technical…

Gmail’s Labels, which started out as a contrarian alternative to the folders used by every other e-mail app on the planet, are getting more and more folder-like.  Google is moving the list of Labels to sit right below your inbox (you know, where folders generally reside) and now lets you drag e-mails to a Label to organize messages (you know, the way you can with folders). You can also drag Labels onto messages, and can hide Labels.

Unlike many new Gmail features, these aren’t debuting as Gmail Labs experiments–Google is rolling them out to everybody right away. (They haven’t shown up in my Gmail accounts yet, though.)

With these changes in place, I’d say that Labels effectively are folders. Except that one e-mail can be organized with multiple Labels at a time.

Now, if Google would only let me undo Conversation threads and see my inbox in an old-fashioned unthreaded view–or at least put the newest message at the top of a conversation–it would be pretty much perfect.

When I hit the sack early this a.m., Gmail was working fine for me. I was one of the lucky ones, apparently: During the wee hours in the U.S., many users of Google’s free e-mail service encountered an outage that lasted for two and a half hours, according to the Official Google Blog. (Why Google acknowledged the glitch on that blog and not at the Official Gmail Blog, I can’t say.)

Gmail outages are nothing extraordinary: I wrote about one major one last August, and a hiccup a couple of weeks ago. And it’s pretty darn common in my experience for Gmail to fail to load–I’m used to it, and just try again until it works. But is the service any flakier than your average Web site? I dunno. As one of the most-used, most-essential services on the Internet, Gmail is under the biggest of microscopes: When it misbehaves, millions of people take notice, and a major crimp is put in their work. Even if it’s actually more reliable than the average service–which it might be.

Google has apologized and says it isn’t yet sure what happened: I’d love to see the company follow up with a post discussing the outage, its cause, and the company’s response. I’m curious, for instance, whether there’s a single explanation for the multiple problems that the service has had in the past few months.

Meanwhile, I’m feeling Pollyannish about this and other major Internet outages: Somebody up there is reminding us that when you give up software for Web-based services, you run the risk of losing access to your data. Even when that data is in the hands of the single company that knows more than any other about delivering reliable services to millions of folks all at one time….

I may be more excited about this than I am about offline Gmail access: Google has made a minor change to Gmail’s user interface that makes it–for some of us, anyhow–a far more appealing service.

Here’s the new Gmail menu bar:

What’s new are the “Move to” and “Labels” items. The latter simply moves the ability to apply a Label to an e-mail into its own menu, which makes it easier to get at the command. (Until now, you’ve had to burrow to the bottom of “More actions” to get at Labels.)

But “Move to” is the addition I’m so enthusiastic about: It lets you apply a Label and move an e-mail out of your inbox into Google’s archive with one click. Essentially, it duplicates the functionality that every other e-mail client on earth provides by allowing you to plunk an e-mail into a folder, thereby filing it away by subject matter and getting it out of your way. Kinda amazing that Google didn’t let you do it until now. (You’ve had to apply the Label and move the e-mail to the archive in two distinct steps–in theory not a biggie, but extra work is extra work. I’ve tended to ignore the problem, which means my inbox is bursting at the seams.)

Google has also introduced keyboard shortcuts and auto-complete functionality that let you label and move messages without touching your mouse; I’m not that much of a shortcut guy, so I’m less jazzed up about these. But some people will be very happy, I bet.

Unlike Slate’s Farhad Manjoo, I don’t think Gmail has reached perfection. And it won’t until it either improves the threaded-conversation interface or makes it optional. But between features that Google launches as Gmail Labs options (such as offline access) and ones it just rolls out for everybody (like the new Label interface), the company is improving Gmail at a dizzying rate…