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Gmail's Second Major Problem

kapilkale.com

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Re: Gmail's Second Major Problem

#61

Post by dsr_ »

95% of non-spam email is delivered within 5 minutes of being sent. This number is made up for the purposes of argument, but I think it's fairly accurate. I've administered mail machines for many years.

There are all sorts of reasons why the other 5% doesn't zip along, and some of those reasons are persistent, some are fixable, and some of them are essentially never going to be tracked down. Does Gmail have an internal problem? Maybe, maybe not, but there's not enough data here to find out.

If you want instant communication, use a direct connection under your control. It's still not guaranteed but at least you'll see the progress or lack thereof.

Re: Gmail's Second Major Problem

#63

Post by kapilkale »

hurstdog wrote: post #57

The issue that you're complaining about was due to the incident linked at [1]. I can't go into the technical details as to why this happened, but I can roughly explain that it was due to the CAP theorem, essentially "Consistency, Availabilty, Partition Tolerance. Choose two." [2] Furthermore, you have to choose partition tolerance [3]. The delivery delays that were seen yesterday is because we choose consistency over…

Thanks Andrew- this is really helpful.

Re: Gmail's Second Major Problem

#64

Post by ceejayoz »

teilo wrote: post #14

I pay over $800 a month for Gmail (ok, for apps for business for many users), and we STILL have this issue, and while we can indeed call Ireland to get support, the answer is always, "We are having a delivery issue. Our engineers are working on it." So paying doesn't help.

> So paying doesn't help.

Well, you can now say "Google knows about the issue" to your clients/bosses rather than "fuck if I know".

Re: Gmail's Second Major Problem

#65

Post by neya »

nessus42 wrote: post #58
neya wrote: post #30

The author is furious about a technology that was not designed for instantaneous delivery (SMTP) and fumes about it, because it isn't instantaneous. What's worse is, he quickly assumes goes into some kind of 'super-hero mode' and makes a pretty heavy claim that this is Gmail's second biggest problem . I think this is the best approach - If someone hands over you a free glass of wine, which they've tried their level b…

> If someone hands over you a free glass of wine, which they've tried their level best to make it perfect, you just drink it instead of trying to suddenly become a food critic I think this is a bogus argument. If someone hands me a free glass of "wine" and it turns out to be undrinkable swill instead of wine, I'm pretty sure I would point this out. With regards to email, people expect email to be fast, and if your em…

Can you please justify how Gmail, an Email client used by probably millions of users suddenly turns out 'un-drinkable' to the author (and to you)?

Can you send E-mails? Yes.

Can you receive E-mails? Yes.

Can you forward E-mails? Yes.

(^Note: This is a paid feature on other popular clients)

Can you read all the E-mails you've sent and received? Yes.

Are you paying for it? No.

So, how does this become 'un-drinkable'? Your e-mail was delivered despite the delay. It would be fair to call it undrinkable if your email wasn't delivered. AFAIK No one promised you they would deliver it within 'x' minutes.

For heaven's sake, it's a bug. People make mistakes, Softwares contain bugs, I'm sure with all your experience put together, you know this better than me. Why make such a huge fuss out of this? How does such a minor problem affecting only a fraction of Gmail users suddenly become Gmail's Second biggest problem?

Re: Gmail's Second Major Problem

#66

Post by mseebach »

buster wrote: post #60
sskates wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As funny as you think it might be to charge $50 a month for guaranteed quick delivery, this is exactly what he actually wants. Large random delays in delivery are costing him way more, so he's willing to pay to fix the pain. Instant delivery isn't in the RFC, but conformance with the spec is not something he cares about. He cares about fast delivery.

Just as you say: What he wants and what he has have nothing to do with each other. I want my pocket to contain 1 million dollar. It's not how it works, unfortunately :( Look, there are many many reasons why an email may not arrive in time or at all at the destination. To say "i lose so much money but i rely on such an unreliable protocol" is just not the mistake of google. And as i said, for 50$ dollar you can easily…

That's assuming your time is worth nothing. Also, there's much more to reliability than having servers in more than one location.

Re: Gmail's Second Major Problem

#67

Post by epochwolf »

sskates wrote: post #46
buster wrote: post #26

Whaaat, SMTP != Instant Delivery!? You must be joking! As much as i can understand the pain of an email not being delivered after 2 hours this seems to be too much drama. "happens 2 times in a month" is not a "major problem" for a free service especially since i suppose this user is part of a rather small minority. I never noticed substantial delivery lags myself over the past years myself. Anyway, if you say "i'd pa…

As funny as you think it might be to charge $50 a month for guaranteed quick delivery, this is exactly what he actually wants. Large random delays in delivery are costing him way more, so he's willing to pay to fix the pain. Instant delivery isn't in the RFC, but conformance with the spec is not something he cares about. He cares about fast delivery.

> He cares about fast delivery.

Then he can find a better solution than email. Make a phone call and upload a file via sftp to a remote server. That's how I do deployments here at Insurasoft™.

Re: Gmail's Second Major Problem

#68

Post by blablabla123 »

neya wrote: post #65
nessus42 wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If someone hands over you a free glass of wine, which they've tried their level best to make it perfect, you just drink it instead of trying to suddenly become a food critic I think this is a bogus argument. If someone hands me a free glass of "wine" and it turns out to be undrinkable swill instead of wine, I'm pretty sure I would point this out. With regards to email, people expect email to be fast, and if your em…

Can you please justify how Gmail, an Email client used by probably millions of users suddenly turns out 'un-drinkable' to the author (and to you)? Can you send E-mails? Yes. Can you receive E-mails? Yes. Can you forward E-mails? Yes. (^Note: This is a paid feature on other popular clients) Can you read all the E-mails you've sent and received? Yes. Are you paying for it? No. So, how does this become 'un-drinkable'? Y…

> How does such a minor problem affecting only a fraction of Gmail users suddenly become Gmail's Second biggest problem?

In my opinion the problem is this: the larger the mailbox or the more often you use Gmail, to higher are the odds of facing described problems. I.e. the heavy users have most problems. So there is the problem, it's just a matter of time until someone else solves it. When someone else solves it, it means those heavy users will migrate to this someone else. (Remember they were also the first who actually had any reasonable use-case in Gmail, that used to be advertised as Mailbox for messies/people with many mails.) The rest will just follow automatically, it's always like that. ;)

Re: Gmail's Second Major Problem

#69

Post by snogglethorpe »

RyanZAG wrote: post #56

Google's servers are incredibly complex. Probably too complex - the more complicated they make their infrastructure (datacenter failover, region failover, bla bla) the more unstable it seems to get. Google uses a very bureaucratic code commit system that requires sign offs from different people. This process takes a long time, and devs can't move onto the next step until the previous step has been accepted [1]. While…

Er, except Google's services aren't unstable.

That doesn't mean they're completely problem-free, but nothing is.

[and given the importance of services like gmail to vast swathes of the population, I certainly hope they require many sign-offs for code commits!]

Re: Gmail's Second Major Problem

#70

Post by snogglethorpe »

jmillikin wrote: post #27
plg wrote: post #3

i wish some major computer company would release an easy-to-use plug and play server product that would enable consumers to run their own mail servers on cheap hardware, just by toggling a switch just imagine... no ads, no privacy concerns, complete control. if they were smart they would include some sort of automatic backup program that runs in the background and saves everything every once in a while, a backup that…

What would happen if I'm on vacation and my apartment loses power, or my ISP-provided DSL modem locks up, or my cat chews on the server's ethernet cable? If the answer is "you might not receive some email", then that is not an acceptable alternative to hosted email.

Exactly. Or you forget to do backups again and lose 6 months of email...

For 99% of the population, centrally hosted, professionally maintained, email services are vastly superior.

Sure, there will always be those who prefer self-hosting, corporations, the sittin'-inna-tree-with-my-M16 crowd, etc., but it's not really the best option for most.

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