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 info.
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, they're on it - but in any other case, maybe they're on it, maybe they're not. Who are we to ask?
Don't mistake lack of customer service for 'disdain'. For every issue related to Googles free products and services when have you ever really, and I mean really needed a traditional customer service rep?
Maybe once? Not at all?
I would hate Gmail never to have happened becuase they felt it would require a call center and they were not prepared to do that...
And as for 'transparency'... um, they're a private company. But a very transparent one at that in many other ways. Just not 'transparent' in this one way?
While I'm here...
(1) "Somebody who goes to a conference might get something like feedback and disseminate it to the masses"
(3) "and if they themselves are affected by a problem, well, boy howdy, they're on it"
To be fair, as a dev its much much easier to solve a problem when you experience it first-hand but I maintain that they don't necessarily wait until it happens to them before problems get addressed.
You know, you could be absolutely right in all respects BUT you assume its somehow malicious, or condescending or whatever - when, at worst, its benign.
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 Google Calendar so I can get it on my mobile devices. As I work for a large Fortune 15-20 company, one of my meetings was a weekly recurring meeting with 2,000+ participants. This is not unusual as our quarterly all employees meeting requests are sent out to 50,000+ participants.
This recurring meeting with only 2,000+ participants was cancelled, but I was completely unable to remove it from my Google Calendar. Google Calendar is broken, and after searching online for about an hour for a solution, I found many other people have the same exact issue.
So, here I am with a recurring event in my Google Calendar that I cannot delete: An error has occurred. Please try again later. - this is the level of support I get from Google.
Basically, search the forums and find the bug has existed since 2009, and no communication from Google about fixing it. Do they really expect to be taken seriously in the enterprise space?
E-mail support is only for "select administrative issues", and phone support is only for reporting "a service unusable issue caused by a Google server error"[1].
It doesn't sound like the GP's issue would fall into either of those categories.
Exactly. I'm not paying for the service so I can't really complain, but when many users report a bug in 2009, where Google Calendar completely chokes and can't delete or modify meeting requests with more than a handful of recipients, you would expect a company like Google to at least reply "we've opened a bug and are working on fixing this issue."
Instead, the silence on their troubleshooting forums is deafening. It's as if the engineers just don't care about fixing it, despite what would happen in the real world if a Google Apps sales rep came to our company to do a real evaluation... I suspect they would be laughed out of the room once they admitted they couldn't handle meeting invites with more than a handful of attendees.
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.
Does google consider gmail users to have value? Be it via ad views or good will, etc. If so, then is it in their interest to provide a commensurate level of support to their users? Sure there's no legal binding contract, but at what point does it cross from being benign to being bad business.
The fact is that this is a common complaint that Google seems content to ignore. Which is their right, but is it the best choice from a business perspective? I don't know.
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 BigTable to fix their speed issues?
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 don't know about because there's no effective way to contact them, they also lose money just like a company with paying customers.
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.
But then there are people that have to work a lot and don't want to care.
Ironically, the main product i am working on is enterprise mail solutions. I could deploy somethign at home or in anotehr datacenter.. but even the time for the setup is too much time to bother with. So in the end, i use gmail for private stuff and our corporate mail system for business.
If i'd have the time to setup the toolchain you mentioned including custom hacks, i'd rather go outside or meet friends, for sure. Or work on some other projects..
ah, yes, and when your mail server goes down for a couple hours? that's a lot of fun.
i've managed my own mail servers from ~2000 to 2008, when it practically became a full time job. i use gmail primarily for (1) the spam filter and (2) not having to worry about downtime.
[edit: and on another note, roundcube development is PAINFULLY slow...]
Once I got the basic configuration and initial stuff down, the mail server's uptime has been ... hmm. Pretty damn close to 100% I think. I think there was an outage a bit back, but that one was my fault. I dicked up one of the databases or something.
On the flip side, I never have to worry about missing email. Like, for example, the time (yesterday) that I tried to send code samples from a WP exploit that did a neat job of turning the web server into an IRC-controlled zombie via a fun little Perl script. The person I was sending them to had a Gmail address.
Guess who never received the files? (And wasn't notified, either...)
Do you really expect GMail to provide personal customer service to its ~176m [1] non-paying users?
No, that would be very difficult. They have only about 20 000 employees. That's 9000 users per employee.
The problem is, the vast majority of those 176 million people have chosen to be in a position where they depend on a service that is run by people who don't care about them personally — who can't care about them, because there are just too many of them. This inevitably means that some of those people, maybe many of them, will get caught in the machine and mangled.
The solution is to provide services like email in a distributed way, instead of with a centralized company. Then, when you have a problem like this, you have access to someone who could plausibly fix it.
The difficulty is that our facilities for providing big centralized servers are leaps and bounds ahead of our facilities for building decentralized applications.
Other people have already commented effectively on the two components of your reply, but let me say that I found the transparency straw man to be the weirder of the two, because that's not how I use that word.
I'd also like to note that from a technical standpoint, I think Google is fantastic. They do great work, I love where they're going with services, and I personally have no complaint with Gmail nor could I improve things were I magically in charge.
But their nearly autistic attitude towards dealing with users is a real problem, and as large as they are, I think they bear a real moral responsibility to make the world a better place. "Don't be evil" is a great motto. I have every reason to believe they try to live up to it. But disengagement from their users to the incredible extent that Google practices it verges dangerously close to evil when it affects so very many people.
A few years ago, I was called in and told that my work machine was pulling huge amounts of data from the net. It eventually turned out that the problem was a buggy version of Google Desktop.
After a fairly intensive search, I found the reason in an obscure Google Groups posting[ http://groups.google.com/group/Google-Desktop_Something-Brok... ]. I experienced the bug six months after the issue was discussed there, and that was the only source of information I could find.
I don't know if Google has improved its support recently, but the obscure way in which information on the bug was disseminated certainly made me more wary of using Google products after that.
Premier Edition? That includes 24/7 phone support, SLA:s, and a lot more. Why are you paying for something if you haven't even bothered checking what you pay for? Doesn't sound very clever to me...
Read some more. The support is limited in many respects, and does not include the ability to complain about and get resolution on issues of website performance.
I have 7.1GB, it's still beyond fast. Size isn't a sufficient condition for whatever problem it is you are seeing. The only time I had a problem was before I abandoned greasemonkey.
Everything is slow. Sending mail, switching labels, searching, even clicking settings or the home icon. I've tried across lots of browsers and computers. It's related to the account. Other, much smaller and newer accounts are fast.
My personal account is using only 648mb and speed has been horrid lately. Most of the time the slowness is in returning back to the inbox. If I get the "Loading" text at the top, it will take ~10 seconds these days.
Fast and slow is subjective. You might be talking about responsiveness of the UI, or a specific feature like search, and someone else might be used to a faster UI, or a faster search.
I'm starting to wonder about that too - I've discussed this with a bunch of people recently, and those of us who are seeing the really awful performance (>30 second wait times for basic operations like sending a mail) seem to be mainly early adopters.
Personally, I'm using Google Apps "Premiere" which I initially purchased about a month after launch.
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 :-(
In a last ditch effort, I bought some extra storage from Google thinking maybe I'd get some kind of premium level service. So far, no.
Ah, to be Google! Your competitors, when frustrated by your poor service and unclear communications, send you more money in the vain hope it might help.
It's so rare that I use the actual GMail interface that I often forget how it even works, or how slow it is. Shortly after GMail allowed IMAP access, I hooked it up to my Mail.app and don't even bother with the web interface. It's so much more convenient, and it's rare that I've have problems when the cries of "GMail is down again" come about.
I definitely think there is room in the market for a new, online, paid email client. One that can connect to multiple outside accounts like Outlook, "infinite" storage, emphasis on privacy, gmail-style user interface, regular backups, and solid customer support. Email is extremely important to people and they don't want to worry about it. I wouldn't mind paying for a reliable and secure email client in the cloud.
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 someone is busy at that scheduled time, I just guess for the next time slot till eventually one fits.
We don't have nearly as much space as you do, so I am forced to completely delete all my messages 4 times a year to free up space. The UI makes this task such a pain (admittedly it is the uni's fault for not forking up enough $$ for enough space, but it is incredibly time wasting and difficult through the web client).
Do I get some sort of notification when my inbox is full? No. Only, I stop receiving emails and every would be sender gets a message that my inbox is full. This continues until someone I meet in person tells me that they haven't been able to communicate with me online for the larger part of the week. No way to get those emails back.
Oh, and all this is after I forward all my messages to gmail and never use Outlook unless I am forced to.
(Sorry, just venting and getting this off my chest.)
Which version? If you're on Exchange 2003 then complaining about how a 7-8 year old program isn't up to scratch is a bit silly. Even 2007 is closing on 4 years old, and the web interface was improved a lot from 2003 to 2007 and again from Exchange 2007 to 2010 (not sure about calendaring specifically).
And if you are on Exchange 2003 or 2007 then IE gets the good browser interface, and every other browser gets a basic one.
Do I get some sort of notification when my inbox is full? No.
This is because someone hasn't turned it on for you; Exchange does this (by default, I thought). Emails you when you hit the "no more sending" limit, then again as you hit the "now so full you can't receive" limit.
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.
Hey, I hear ya. That sucks that you're having a bad time with it.
Honestly, I live in Outlook, so I only use the web client in a pinch. I like it better than Gmail, but perhaps with heavy use and a small quota it starts to show its warts.
I've got <8000 emails at around 2GB. Gmail seems to have been slow for the past couple of weeks, but it does vary. Usually 20-30 seconds to load Gmail; 15-20 seconds to open an email. 30 seconds or more to send.
I just hid chat, buzz and 'web clips'. I also set the theme back to classic. Not sure what did it (or if it was even something I did), but it's back to normal now, even if I turn everything back on.
Themes caused the most round-about slowdown for me when they were introduced. I haven't gone back to using any theme sense and I get fast speeds on a 5k msg account.
Also - Hooray for a free, fantastic email service. Thanks google!
I have all mail since 2001 (around 80'000 messages) in my google (apps, paid) account. While the web interface is still acceptably fast (as long as I don't browse my All Mail label), but the iphone (and ipad) frontend has become unbearably slow in the last few weeks.
It opens quickly, loads the locally cached page and then it's just spinning and spinning for up to 5 minutes before it either reloads the page completely, signs me out again or finally displays the new mail.
Considering this is a product from a company that places so much importance on speed, this is completely inacceptable, IMHO.
I had the same problem with the iPhone web UI. Delete the local HTML5 database from Mobile Safari, then kill and restart Mobile Safari, or restart your phone. Once I did this, iPhone web gmail was fast again.
I started having this problem with the mobile Gmail interface a few weeks ago too. The solution was to stop using a bookmarked inbox URL. When I use the http://mail.google.com/a/mydomain.com/ URL instead (and go through several redirects to the mobile site), my inbox loads nearly instantly every time.
I have no idea why this is the case, but it solved my problem.
My android gmail app is just as fast as the web. I have 35k messages, about 1.5gb. The web interface is slowish, but I haven't noticed the phone app being any slower.
Really? I don't see the two as being remotely related. In fact, I'm tempted to say that google's technical brilliance is likely the reason for their poor customer service.
What is amazing is that a company as large and with as many products as Google - regardless of its technical prowess - hasn't set up the necessary customer service infrastructure yet.
Exactly this. And I hope Google doesn't shift to making a customer service infrastructure take much more of their time than it already does.
I mean, think about a 'problem' explanation like this post: "My e-mail is running slower than it used to, and other people with a similar usage profile aren't having the same problem." It's hard to get much more vague than that without trying. I really don't want someone to have to clarify that problem statement then spend hours trying to reproduce the problem.
The one time I had a clearly defined problem that I could reproduce (this was with a Google Mini), a post in the forums got me an answer within 4 hours. For everything else, peer support has always been sufficient (or, if not, a clear statement of what reproduces the problem usually gets a Google response).
My experience (google docs API problem), was that I could provide sample code that looked like it ought to work, but actually triggered an internal server error from google, was on a paid support contract, and it wasn't resolved for about 9 months, with months often passing between google responses to my email on the subject.
There is no way Google can scale customer service to be profitable for free services. Gmail at the end of the day is a free service, and you should either (a) pick a different email provider or (b) setup shop yourself if you need that kind of service.
Most of the complaints I've seen about Google's customer-service, ironically, are from people who are paying customers. So it's not that they provide service to people who pay for it, it's that they don't seem to provide service, period.
Is there any software out there that handles spam as well as Gmail's spam filter?
The rest of the features that Gmail offers seem like they'd be hard to replicate as well - I'm talking about the cool stuff like being able to put arbitrary periods in your email address, or adding +whatever to the end of it.
I really like Gmail today, but if there were a way to replicate all the nice things it does on a server I controlled that would be pretty sweet.
That and I can't shake the fear that one day my Google account will be locked for some mysterious reason and I'll be stuck without any of my email until I can figure out how to get it turned back on.
I don't have the advantage of being a blogger, and that seems to be the only reliable way to get customer service from Google.
I recommend using Gmail (ideally, Google Apps for Your Domain) as your primary, and using an IMAP sync tool to back it up to something not owned by Google.
With some a hundred employee accounts in Gmail for the past several years, I'd say it's been more reliable than the local electric company. We've never needed customer service from Google for Gmail.
We're all engineers, but we have better things to do than run email servers. Email is a problem we can happily consider "solved".
The spam filter isn't my favorite. Every time I go into my junk mail folder, I see too many mailing list entries in there, for obviously valid messages. These are all programming mailing lists, and the messages are just regular programming talk.
The Google AdSense customer support team has been very quick to respond to my inquiries over the years. This is probably attributed to being one of their direcly profiting products, perhaps.
I'd be tempted to design a "Never delete email again! We autodelete all email 10 days after receipt! Mandatory!" service.
It would be able to be cheap/free/low infrastructure by not needing masses of storage, and stay fast by not needing to handle tens of thousands of mails. And it wouldn't need a complex UI or tagging/labelling/tabbing/folders.
Also it would encourage / enforce dealing with mails and getting the information of of your mailbox and putting it wherever it needs to be.
It would also probably need to have a tie-in with some persona wiki and dropbox so you could easily shunt relevant content that you need to keep.
I think many people would find that they just don't need most old email and wouldn't miss it. The panic of "I have it around somewhere, let me spend time searching ... I think Bob sent it to me one time" is replaced by the certainty of "I don't have it".
If email was physical stuff, we'd call email archiving a hording disorder.
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.
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 etacts and otherinbox and looking for people I used to contact years ago (old projects) and deleted emails from those projects.
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.
Only 730 MB, 11309 messages here, and I can confirm that the service has been steadily slowing over the past three or four weeks. Loading my inbox from scratch can take well over 10 seconds, and I have reproduced this on multiple machines in my home and multiple machines on my corporate network. Starting new emails, sending emails, switching labels, all slow.
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.
Well, at least it works. When I open it in Chrome I get:
The webpage at https://www.google.com/accounts/ServiceLogin?service=mail... has resulted in too many redirects. Clearing your cookies for this site or allowing third-party cookies may fix the problem. If not, it is possibly a server configuration issue and not a problem with your computer.
I'm using over 5200MB, over 90,000 messages and 54 labels and haven't noticed any speed problems. Though the majority of my messages are archived, with only ~6000 in my inbox.
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.
Browsing mail is still adequately fast for me; I have 33k threads and I don't have any problem loading up labels or switching back and forth from inbox to any other thing. I'm using 2GB of space.
I did find the search slow and inadequate though, so I downloaded and indexed all of my messages with Thunderbird and just use that when I want to search for something. I need to do an export to a conventional mbox or something soon, too.
Google docs has been doing that for me for a few months, I found that if I close the main docs screen after opening a document (in a new window), it usually fixes the problem.
A few months ago my gmail was slow I deleted my mail down from 23k msgs to under 1000. I nuke all unstarred msgs from mailing lists, etc. Seemed to help. Although still not lightning fast (like the Chrome browser :-)).
It was extremely slow for me for a couple of days (so slow it was unusable) but then it fixed itself. Seemed more like a temporary issue or bug than something related to inbox size.
For me, IMAP is not slow at all. In fact, I almost never have a problem with GMail over IMAP at all - and I have 3 separate email accounts (some under google apps for your domain) that all check every 30 minutes or so).
Let's not forget that IMAP clients often queue the connection requests, so that when you hit Send it gives them illusion that it was quick, while it's often still sending in the background.
Sometimes I have issues with large attachments using Mail.app through IMAP, but I think its mostly Mail.app messing up or google throttling the connection.
Would be curious to know if IMAP is slow for Weinberg specifically. Others report good web experience, and disjoint others report good IMAP experience.
