Google Boondoogle
Watch out with Google Gmail. A whole bunch of emails I sent out today haven’t got out. Sometimes, y’know, things sit on a sending server awhile and sometimes they sit on a receiving server at the other end. But, in my case, it’s clearly a Google problem. I have the advantage of several email accounts on several different servers and the ability to test things out pretty well. Also, whenever I send an email from gmail, I send a bcc to myself at a different address. If not for that, I wouldn’t have realized that the emails I sent weren’t going anywhere. A few of them finally got delivered after about six hours. Some are still not delivered after 12 hours. My ticket to Google support got a quick standard automated response, but still no actual response after 8 hours, and counting. Far as I can tell, I seem to be receiving okay.
Yeah, I guess they need to keep the “beta” label a while longer.
kathie says:
Uh-oh. Maybe I should start bcc-ing myself on some of my e-mails. Good call. Luckily, it’s not business-related…all my business stuff goes out on another system. That one crashes about twice a year.
John says:
Here’s the automated response from gmail:
Hello,
Thank you for your bug report. This auto-generated email is to confirm
that we received your inquiry.
We are working hard to keep pace with the popularity of Gmail, and regret
that we cannot respond to every message.
In the meantime, you can refer to our list of known bugs at
http://gmail.google.com/support/bin/request.py to learn more about the
most commonly reported problems. Also, you can check the ‘Troubleshooting’
section of the Help Center, located at
http://gmail.google.com/support/bin/topic.py?topic=133, for fixes to
common problems.
We will contact you if your problem requires further investigation or
assistance not covered in our Help Center. Thank you for your patience.
Sincerely,
The Gmail Team
John says:
After getting their automated response, I sent this:
OK, thanks, I’m being patient. There’s still a problem, BTW. But only
on my account. My wife’s account is sending mail
just fine from the same computer to all of the addresses that aren’t
getting mail sent from my account. Something’s choking on bandolero.
John
John says:
And, with still no help after two days, I sent this:
Hey, c’mon! I know you’re busy with the IPO and all, but the problems
are definitely not covered in the Help Center. Something’s really
screwy. Now I’m starting to get warnings about not being able to
deliver to certain addresses, and yet we have family members with two
other gmail accounts using the same computers (PC and laptop) from
home and those accounts are not experiencing any of this stuff even
though we’ve been experimenting by sending emails to the same
addresses. And now that Monday is here I’ve been able to experiment
from the computers at the office and the problem’s the same here, too.
So it’s not restricted to cache or cookies on a certain computer.
Please respond in some fashion that helps me think I’ll want to stick
with gmail and recommend it to others. As it stands, I’ve had to send
a warning to one person I sent an invitation to, advising her not to
use gmail for anything important.
John Chappell
kathie says:
Grrr! Go get em, Tiger!
John says:
Grrr, indeed! But, it looks like sometime this evening they got around to servicing whatever was out of service, or calibrating whatever was out of calibration, or upgrading whatever was out of um, er, grade. Anyhow, bandolero’s outgoing emails have been reaching destinations pronto for the past hour or so. :thumbup: Let’s hope this turns out to be the norm rather than the cliff, er, I mean, the rule rather than the exception. :bouncy: Still no word from gmail support, however.
kathie says:
Glad to hear that the squeaky wheel gets greased. Um, I mean…gets the grease. Yay Bandolero!
John says:
I don’t think a squeaky wheel had anything to do with it. Something either just worked itself out or somebody just happened to fix the problem, but I’m sure my hollering had nothing to do with it.
What’s funny is, even today some of the emails bandolero sent Saturday are finally arriving at their destinations. Obviously, whatever server was handling the bandolero requests was having either DNS issues or mail routine issues. I gotta assume it wasn’t only affecting me. There finally was probably such a backlog of undelivered mail from that server that one of their IT people couldn’t help noticing.
Still curious to see if I ever get an actual reply to my bug report. And I was just reading the Playboy interview where they were going on about their “do no evil” and “be good” mantras. Heh.
John says:
From: Juan Chappell
To: Gmail Team
Subject: Re: [#13286265] Mail Not Getting Sent
Well, knock on wood but so far today we’re getting snappy performance
sending as well as receiving email. Not, of course, that I changed
anything at my end to account for the difference. So whatever you did
(fix a corrupt dns table?), I appreciate it, although I suspect it was
done without regard to my report. I am still curious to find out if
anybody ever actually responds to my report. In my line of work, not
responding (an automated acknowledgement doesn’t count) to a request
for help is considered “evil”. The oblique reference to Google’s
corporate mantra is intentional.
John
John says:
Amazing. Nine days after I reported the problem, and a week after reporting the problem was gone, I get this. Yeah, like I’m gonna spend two hours putting together all those headers for them. I did send a lot of test emails to myself, but how’m I s’posed to get the headers off the emails that were finally delivered to other people? Most of them would be clueless if I wrote and asked them to send me back a reply and be sure to include the full headers. Actually, as I read this a couple more times, I don’t think they even understand what they’re asking me to do. Maybe I’m not reading it right. If anybody thinks they’re asking me to do something simple that would only take a few minutes, let me know. Meanwhile, I’ll ponder whether to ignore them or to send them a reply asking if they’re serious.
From: Gmail Team
To: bandolero@gmail.com
Date: Mon, 23 Aug 2004 16:28:39 -0700
Subject: Re: [#13286265] Mail Not Getting Sent
Hello John,
We apologize for the delayed response. Gmail is experiencing rapid growth.
We have been working hard to keep pace with the popularity of our service
while we respond to each individual message. We appreciate your patience.
Thank you for your report. We apologize for any inconvenience this issue
may have caused. We are aware of this problem, and our engineers are
working diligently to find a solution.
To help us better diagnose this issue, please respond to this message and
include the full headers for each delayed message, including the time it
took for the messages to arrive. To display full message headers, open
your message, and click ‘More options’ next to the recipient(s) name(s).
Click ‘Show original.’ Copy and paste the contents of the new browser
window in to your reply. If you do not wish to include the text of the
affected message, please be sure that you paste the entirety of all other
information listed above.
We appreciate your patience during our limited test period, and we thank
you for taking the time to send us your feedback and concerns.
Sincerely,
The Gmail Team