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Gmail has become unusably slow

gabrielweinberg.com

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Re: Gmail has become unusably slow

#91
post #82
post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google's utter disdain for our quaint notions of customer service and transparency Do you really expect GMail to provide personal customer service to its ~176m [1] non-paying users? Run the numbers: if the average user calls in 5 minutes a year (very low estimate), how many hours a day of customer support would it take? And transparency - are you suggesting they open source their infrastructure so you can hack on Big…

Do you really expect GMail to provide personal customer service to its ~176m [1] non-paying users? Don't mistake non-paying for no-profit. Those users don't pay cash but they do give google lots of personal data and ad-clicks that makes google money. I would personally rather pay a fee and keep my data private and not see ads. If google loses "non-paying" customers because of performance issues or outages that they d…

I put together my own mail server on Linode a while back, after getting frustrated with Gmail's ridiculously limited filtering and tagging.

I use RoundCube webmail, Dovecot, Postfix, managesieve, SpamAssassin, and a few custom hacks. It works great. Gmail used to have the added annoyance of making Firefox unusably slow if it was open for hours at a time; I now can have my mailbox open for days at a time with no browser performance hit. I can make filters as simple or complex as I want.

Gmail has now become my spamcatch.

Re: Gmail has become unusably slow

#92
post #11

interesting. i guess I have about 7k emails stored in my account. maybe 10 labels. a bunch of labs featues enabled. and everything is usually pretty instant for me. searches never take more than a second or two. There's an occassional hiccup, but nothing really troubling. using chrome and FF on OSX

I have 50,689 messages now, down from ~68K. So I deleted like 18K. Again, it seems ridiculous that I need to delete messages. However, it is even more ridiculous that if this is the solution that works, Gmail makes it really hard to make it work. There is no way to search for the biggest messages. There is no way to isolate all mailing lists. I can't find a way to search for [ in the subject. I ended up launching up…

I've been having the exact same problem. I've been playing around with Outlook + Xobni as a possible solution. Xobni is really nice software. It has some killer features that I'd love to have on any webmail client.

Syncing contacts and email with Google apps is an issue, but from what I read, paying GOOG $50 a year solves that problem.

Re: Gmail has become unusably slow

#93
post #8

The Gmail team is most definitely aware of this and a fix is in the works. At SXSW this year there was a panel with four or five Gmail team members and this came up — they said it's related to the size of your inbox, and that it has a lot of Googlers complaining internally too, since many of them have the oldest/large accounts. Also see http://techcrunch.com/2010/03/14/gmail-slow/ , though it has basically the same i…

related to the size of your inbox

I wish there were an easier way to export mail. Probably half my gmail storage consists of mail & attachments from a project I worked on last year where the the other guy absolutely refused to use Google docs or dropbox or any similar solution, and insisted that every revision of every document be transferred via attachment, so that one folder is taking up most of a gigabyte.

I'd love to just zip, burn to DVD, and shelve the data but unfortunately there doesn't seem to be any way to 'archive for export' and then just download it: I have to set up a mail client and transfer it all via IMAP, which will take a whole day :-(

Re: Gmail has become unusably slow

#94
post #84

As an aside; is there a web based email service/client comparable to gmail? More particularly is there one which handles conversation view as well as gmail does? Until there is then gmail has a bit of a monopoly on users like me who love the client and everything that sets it apart from traditional email.

Zimbra threads messages and offers the best webmail I've found outside of Gmail. Definitely feels more sluggish than Gmail though.

Re: Gmail has become unusably slow

#95
I think you've got to see this video really:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rOtEQB-9tvk&feature=relat...

I think gmail is a fabulous product (imagine emails before gmail) and like every other agile product, it has its problems. The fact that we don't have to spend "any" money for storing gigs of our data on a secure and safe platform is probably enough for me to use it.

Re: Gmail has become unusably slow

#98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sorry, but even though I've never needed Google support for Gmail, that doesn't excuse their lack of it. If they want to be taken seriously, or considered at all for real enterprise app replacement with Gmail or Google docs, they need to have a real live phone support, 1-800 number that lusers can call to get someone that will try to help them. Let me give you a terrible example: I sync my Exchange calendar with…

When I tested out Apps Premier I was able to get phone support and was very well assisted by them. While a certain level of support is expected from a 'free' service, I don't think it is viable to offer phone support for it. In much the same way, it is horribly difficult to get phone support for any free email service, yahoo, hotmail, etc.

Me too. After one escalation I got a super pleasant guy on the phone who spent 10 minutes helping me find the problem (which, btw, was my own fault).

Re: Gmail has become unusably slow

#99
post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FWIW, we used hosted Exchange from MS: http://microsoft.com/online/ Its $5/user/month, 25GB storage, great webmail client, and hands down the best support I've ever gotten.

Whoah, whoah whoah! We have hosted Exchange at my university. The Outlook web client is perhaps the worst piece of software I am forced to use on a regular basis. The calendaring is completely useless on the web client. I can't see anyone else's schedules so when I make meetings with them, its like shooting a rifle blind folded. I have to do a "guess and check" method where if Outlook vomits in my face and says someo…

For the older versions of Exchange, OWA is actually pretty terrific in IE, a completely different UI -- they invented XHR to implement it! In the IE version, you can purge your inbox in a couple clicks.

In the last release or two (which not that many organizations use yet), they've unified it so that there's only one OWA that uses the now standard XHR support in all modern browsers on all platforms.

Re: Gmail has become unusably slow

#100
post #73
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Y'know, this article isn't about Gmail performance nearly as much as it is another article about Google's utter disdain for our quaint notions of customer service and transparency. Somebody who goes to a conference might get something like feedback and disseminate it to the masses - but that's it. Google is not interested in hearing about problems, and if they themselves are affected by a problem, well, boy howdy, th…

Google's utter disdain for our quaint notions of customer service and transparency Do you really expect GMail to provide personal customer service to its ~176m [1] non-paying users? Run the numbers: if the average user calls in 5 minutes a year (very low estimate), how many hours a day of customer support would it take? And transparency - are you suggesting they open source their infrastructure so you can hack on Big…

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