11 ms·
Gmail has become unusably slow
- w3matter 16y agoFor you.
- sucuri2 16y agoI was having the exact same problem when my account was using around 85% of the allowed storage. I also had another account with very little emails stored and it was pretty fast. My solution (quite lame): I redirected the "full" account to the other one and started to only use the later. So far no more problems...
- kbrower 16y agoWould be curious to know if pop and imap are also slow
- billturner 16y agoFor 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).
- bshep 16y agoSometimes 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.
- kevinelliott 16y agoLet'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.
- cmelbye 16y agoGmail's web interface would do that too. It's not like it just blocks with a white page while it waits to send.
- giangbiscan 16y agoIt is for me. Loading takes forever. I gave up, only use web now. Web is fast and good for me though.
- nfnaaron 16y agoWould be curious to know if IMAP is slow for Weinberg specifically. Others report good web experience, and disjoint others report good IMAP experience.
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- billturner 16y agoIt'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.
- uptown 16y agoGoogle says they're aware of the speed issue, that they have a solution, and that they're fixing it. http://techcrunch.com/2010/03/14/gmail-slow/ http://techcrunch.com/2010/03/14/gmail-slow/
- jkincaid 16y agoThe 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/ http://techcrunch.com/2010/03/14/gmail-slow/, though it has basically the same info.
- epi0Bauqu 16y agoThat reference says "slowness is really only an issue for power users of the service — those with hundreds of thousands or even millions of messages." I only have 50K messages at a little over 4GB. People are saying they have inboxes as full as mine and are still fast. Something doesn't add up. Is my account on an old infrastructure?
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- timmaah 16y agoMy 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.
- mattmcknight 16y agoI 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. Which operations are slow for you?
- epi0Bauqu 16y agoEverything 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.
- RyanMcGreal 16y agoIt continues to amaze me that a company as technically brilliant and pervasive as Google is so spectacularly bad at even rudimentary customer service.
- latch 16y agoReally? 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.
- paulgb 16y agoI think it's also amazing that, in a decade of using many Google products and APIs, I've never needed to contact support.
- boredguy8 16y agoExactly 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).
- mstevens 16y agoMy 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.
- blehn 16y agointeresting. 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
- epi0Bauqu 16y agoI 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.
- surki 16y agoUse IMAP access to get & sort messages by size and delete ?
- blehn 16y agoyeah definitely agree -- it shouldn't slow down with more messages if one of the primary selling points is, "never delete another message."
- Terretta 16y agoAlso, I haven't found any way to do a search then delete particular messages without deleting the whole conversation. Anyone know how to do a search w/o pulling in conversations, and/or delete selected search results without deleting whole threads? At present, I resort to IMAP. // Over 150,000 messages per mail box, working on my third mail box.
- hokkos 16y agoHow do you know the total number of message is gmail ?
- TwoSheds 16y agoI have 600 MB stuff there, and it certainly beats my corporate Outlook in speed...
- pkrumins 16y agoAs I was reading your article, I got an idea. Create Duck Duck Mail! Your search engine is awesome, and I bet your mail service would be awesome too!
- nlawalker 16y agoOnly 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.
- pilif 16y agoI 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.
- tritowntim 16y agoI 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.
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- pilif 16y agoyeah. for at most one day. Then it's back to the old level of speed. Unfortunately.
- lutorm 16y agoMy 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.
- rgrove 16y agoI 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/ 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.
- Kilimanjaro 16y agoMy only complain is about loading time. It takes forever. Compared to Google Reader, which loads the UI instantly, then loads the data, I say Gmail should work that way. Don't let me stare at a white page with a retarded progress bar for a minute.
- mgcross 16y agoI'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.
- harry 16y agoThemes 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!
- harry 16y agoThemes 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!
- ireadzalot 16y agoI am running at 42% of storage. What I do is archive my messages every couple of weeks. I have noticed it always helps.
- melling 16y agoA 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 :-)).
- scdlbx 16y agoI'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.
- rmorrison 16y agoI 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.
- qeorge 16y agoFWIW, we used hosted Exchange from MS: http://microsoft.com/online/ http://microsoft.com/online/ Its $5/user/month, 25GB storage, great webmail client, and hands down the best support I've ever gotten.
- mnemonik 16y agoWhoah, 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 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.)
- qeorge 16y agoHey, 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.
- gojomo 16y agoIn 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.
- scorpion032 16y agoNow, That's a clever catch!
- phreanix 16y agoI also noticed that Google Apps (docs, etc.) really spikes my processor load. Anybody else experiencing this?
- orblivion 16y agoI had enough and switched back to the "Older Version". It's not bad that way.
- dalore 16y agoYet another reason to jump on the GTD bandwagon and have a 0 emails in your inbox policy.
- webwright 16y agoTime for DuckDuckEmail, I say! :-)
- jodrellblank 16y agoI'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.
- kilps 16y agoAs 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.
- mgcross 16y agoZimbra threads messages and offers the best webmail I've found outside of Gmail. Definitely feels more sluggish than Gmail though.
- curiousfiddler 16y agoI think you've got to see this video really: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rOtEQB-9tvk&feature=related 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.
- gamma_raj 16y agoUse the HTML version
- papachito 16y agoIt's still very fast here.
- vhawk 16y agoit'sachingly slow here in england, not so bad on IE but dreadsful on firefox
- stef25 16y agoIt 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.
- elight 16y agoSerioously and i thought that it was just me. I'm so glad to have found GMail Users Not-so-anonymous!
- emehrkay 16y agoMy account was deactivated today for no apparent reason. It allowed me to reactive it by giving them my phone number. What's good Google?
- coned88 16y agoI stopped using gmail a while ago. I use lavabit now and its so much better.
- tybris 16y agoWell, at least it works. When I open it in Chrome I get: The webpage at https://www.google.com/accounts/ServiceLogin?service=mail&passive=true&rm=false&continue=https%3A%2F%2Fmail.google.com%2Fmail%2F%3Fshva%3D1%26ui%3Dhtml%26zy%3Dl&ss=1&scc=1<mpl=default<mplcache=2 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. (and of course, clearing cookies does not work)
- Jeema3000 16y ago"Gmail has become unusably slow" If it's that bad, then it begs the question: why do you continue to use it? There's plenty of alternatives. Vote with your feet and let them know.
- cookiecaper 16y agoBrowsing 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.