Regular readers know I’ve been slowly migrating from a hosted Exchange plan for my e-mail over to Google’s Gmail service mainly due to their IMAP offering. The delay in my move is mainly due to moving mail from one service to another; when I have time (and remember the task), I move a bunch of mail items from the Exchange server into my Google account. Perhaps taking my time has been a good omen.For the past week, I’ve noticed varying delays in receiving messages. The delay can be as little as 30 minutes, but has been as much as three days. There seems to be no rhyme or reason and apparently others are experiencing the issue as well.
I don’t believe the problem is related to any single client or platform. Over the past seven days, I’ve tested and observed the behavior on the web, in Mac Mail, and in Outlook on both Windows XP and Vista. Even when some delayed mail comes in and I think the queue is generally caught up, I’ve seen another older bit of mail come through hours later. All in all it’s very strange and somewhat disappointing.The mail clients all seem to be re-caching the entire mailbox at an extremely low rate of speed. I’ve had the Mail Activity windows open on my Mac this morning and progress will just stall and sit at 0.0 KB/s.
All of my other web services are running fine so I don’t suspect any issue with my Internet connection. Based on everything I’ve seen and the information I have, I can only conclude a server-side issue.I’ve reported the issue to Google’s Gmail support area, complete with details and screenshots. At this point, I haven’t heard back yet, but then again, I used my Gmail address for them to reply. Maybe there’s a note from them sitting around on the server somewhere?In any case, I’m anticipating the “Serves you right, what do you expect for free?” commentary, which of course, is valid. Two thoughts come to mind. I could pay the $50 for Gmail through Google Apps and that would guarantee a higher rate of availability but how do I know that I still wouldn’t have the problem? Again, I’m assuming with evidence that this is server-side issue.The other bit that bothers me about this is that Google has built it’s business on free services. Yes, they do offer some for minimal cost, but their bread-and-butter is from advertising on free services. That’s their business model in my view so it’s almost irrelevant to me that the service I’m having an issue with is free. Regardless, this doesn’t give me a “warm fuzzy” feeling right now. E-mail is the single-most important communication method I use at home and on the road.In any case, I wanted to mention the issue in case others are witnessing odd mail behavior through Gmail and thought it was just them. It’s likely not. Addiitionally, in the time I took to write this post, the Mail Activity has cached another five items. In about 20 minutes. Google: I await a solution.
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