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Gmail's Second Major Problem

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Re: Gmail's Second Major Problem

#71

Post by snogglethorpe »

kaolinite wrote: post #22

I'd say the #1 problem is spam filtering, which for me has gotten worse and worse. Recently I have had PayPal payment notifications going into spam! It's a shame because Gmail used to have incredibly good spam filtering - good enough that I didn't check it, as I knew I could trust it - however now I don't trust it at all.

I'm not sure what you're doing (it certainly depends on what your legitimate email stream looks like), but for me, gmail's spam filters are still incredibly good, probably as close to perfect as I've ever seen.

It's impossible for such a thing to be 100% perfect, of course (even your own eyes will deceive you occasionally!), but gmail's filters are good enough that spam is not an issue for me any longer.

Re: Gmail's Second Major Problem

#72

Post by snogglethorpe »

derfniw wrote: post #29
psynix wrote: post #11

Your problem is that you're relying on a method of communication that was never guaranteed to be instantaneous. Maybe you should investigate other forms of communication within your team besides (or in conjunction) with email.

100% agreed. I try to treat email as any other letter I recieve(1). Meaning that the sender can only expect an instant reply if I know beforehand the mail is coming and urgent. The same way one would rapidly reply to an urgent letter one is expecting, but easily take a day or more to reply to, or even open, a non urgent letter. If you need to get a hold of someone directly you should use your phone (to call them). If…

...and of course even voicemail / SMS are not guaranteed to be seen anytime soon!

[If at all; I know plenty of people who simply never check their voicemail...]

Re: Gmail's Second Major Problem

#73

Post by nessus42 »

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…

> 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)?

If I routinely experienced delays of two hours with Gmail, I would find it undrinkable. For instance, I arrange to meet people using Gmail. Sometimes for important events. E.g., my girlfriend tells me at what time I should come over, and she often gives me little notice. Or we'll arrange when and where to me for a concert shortly before the event.

I've been using email for this purpose for my entire adult life, and it has almost always worked for this purpose just fine.

Since I don't typically experience the kind of delays mentioned by the OP, I am happy with Gmail. If I did experience them, I would be as unhappy with Gmail as the OP.

Re: Gmail's Second Major Problem

#74

Post by nwh »

rz2k wrote: post #8
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…

How come Zimbra seems to be so widely disparaged? Spam control requires a little more intervention than with Gmail, but I've found it straightforward enough to set up once, then do nothing else for a couple years.

Straightforward? I'd love to know your secret.

Compile this odd package with this patch. Now these three more. Oh they don't compile? That's right, they haven't been maintained for 3 years. Etc, etc.

Re: Gmail's Second Major Problem

#75

Post by rz2k »

nwh wrote: post #74
rz2k wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How come Zimbra seems to be so widely disparaged? Spam control requires a little more intervention than with Gmail, but I've found it straightforward enough to set up once, then do nothing else for a couple years.

Straightforward? I'd love to know your secret. Compile this odd package with this patch. Now these three more. Oh they don't compile? That's right, they haven't been maintained for 3 years. Etc, etc.

I created a VPS with CentOS. I think I started with CentOS 5.6 and Zimbra 6.8 Community Version. I last updated it about two years ago, so that it is now CentOS release 5.8 and Zimbra 7.1.1_GA_3196.RHEL5_64.

It intermittently was used by different groups of about 50 people who accessed it using IMAP and the web portal without any problem.

Now all it is doing is continuing to collect email subscriptions from software vendors I was trying out at the time, though some other people may still be using it. I don't think anyone else even knew how to access the administration console, and I haven't logged into the admin console in over a year.

Occasionally, log into the shell, because of a bug I never bothered to address. It slowly collects a lot of temporary files. Speaking of which I should do that now:

`Last login: Sat Sep 1 19:27:28 2012 from __`.

Then I ran:

    for i in {0..9}
    do
        find /tmp/jna${i}*.tmp -cmin +30 -exec rm {} \;
        echo $i "out of 9" `date`
    done
To be honest, that is ugly, and I should upgrade. The script took 30 minutes to run, and found 20GB that had accumulated in under 5 months. However, it isn't critical for anyone, and To answer your question: I'm sure not every module is functioning perfectly, and though it hasn't needed much maintenance over the past year, it hasn't been under much load either.

Re: Gmail's Second Major Problem

#76

Post by rdl »

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…

I'm pretty happy with Kerio Connect (MS Exchange-compatible, so it does push email to iphones/etc.) -- if anyone wants this, we're technically signed up as resellers and can sell you software licensed to host on your own servers.

The web client sucks a bit compared to Google, but otherwise it's essentially Exchange, but vastly cheaper and easier to manage.

Re: Gmail's Second Major Problem

#77

Post by rachelbythebay »

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…

That link seems to be dead.

I wish I could share with you the pictures of "the big picture" in which every piece of proprietary tech was given its own little circle on a whiteboard and then was connected to everything else which it uses or which uses it.

To say it was huge was an understatement.

Re: Gmail's Second Major Problem

#78

Post by nessus42 »

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…

Also, is it your claim that if it frequently took two weeks for Gmail to deliver some emails, then that would be OK because Gmail is free? After all, even if it took two weeks, you could still send E-mails, receive E-mails, and forward E-mails.

For many purposes, two hours might as well be two weeks or two years.

Barring network outages and the like, people expect email to be delivered within two minutes, not two years, two weeks, or two hours.

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