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Gmail as a Facade
- dungwiz 14y agoI too have been unable to get a full POP download of everything in my Gmail account...a terrifying thought that this is all locked up with Google and there's no way for me to get my own mail out.
- atto 14y agoTry this: http://gmvault.org/ http://gmvault.org/
- slig 14y agoThanks! I've been looking for a way to migrate from @gmail to my own domain using google apps and this looks exactly what I wanted.
- carlesfe 14y agoI've been using gmvault for months without even a warning message. It's great.
- tripzilch 14y agoI can recommend. It took about half an hour to get my full GMail the first time, and later minutes to get the backup up-to-date. Come to think of it, I haven't actually checked if it got my emails correctly :) I should probably reg a throwaway GMail and see if I can clone my current mailbox.
- jrockway 14y agoI have about 3G of mail that I sync with offlineimap; seems to work OK. How much mail do you have and what client are you using to download it?
- brucehart 14y agoThe tool that I like to use for Gmail backups is a Python script called BaGoMa: http://sourceforge.net/p/bagoma/home/BaGoMa/ http://sourceforge.net/p/bagoma/home/BaGoMa/
- 16s 14y agoI use getmail to retrieve my gmail to my local network every week. It works fine.
- tsahyt 14y agoBack when I dumped my Gmail account I wrote a little Python program using imaplib to download and save everything into a database. The script got lost with my last system upgrade since it was in a temporary directory of which I usually make no backups. It's very easy to write though, just get yourself an imaplib tutorial and hack away.
- jpxxx 14y agoSad, I thought Gmail problems were limited to their IMAP implementation. It is truly punishing once mailboxes start becoming sizable: broken attachment downloads, spontaneous corruption of messages, and problems performing any kind of folder operation.
- druiid 14y agoHuh, interesting. I haven't gotten to this point yet but was kind of wondering about this. Does this mean that Google does not use any sort of indexing, or is it not that great? I haven't seen any documentation about the internals of Gmail so I can only wonder. I know with Dovecot without proper (and properly stored... not on NFS) index files, after about 9-10gigs of storage, IMAP and IMAP related tasks became super slowwwww.
- comicjk 14y agoKeeping a separate connection to the database for searching, which doesn't effect the performance of the current messages? That sounds like the kind of thing computers should be doing for us.
- kevinconroy 14y agoHmm, I don't doubt that the facade solution is working, but can't say that the slowness is necessary systemic. I have two Gmail accounts - 1 work email on Google Apps at 10GB, 1 personal on normal Gmail at 3GB. Can't see any performance differences. Are others experiencing this?
- notatoad 14y agoI'm guessing the author's problems might stem from his usage. something like waiting 20 seconds to see a sent message in the sent messages view is not something most users would notice. This might be happening to me every time i send a message, there is no way i will ever notice it, because i don't hop over to sent messages every time i send an email just to see how long it takes to show up.
- lamnk 14y agoNo, not the lag of seeing the sent messages appear 20 second later in the "Sent" view. But I do notice the slowness when I search for old, archived mails. Searches for new mails are much faster, you can see the result returned almost instantly. This is not the case if you search for, say, a 2-3 year old email.
- runako 14y ago> 1 work email on Google Apps at 10GB, 1 personal on normal Gmail at 3GB My account experiences the slowness the OP describes: - Seconds to open a conversation, often punctuated with messages indicating that the operation failed and must be retried. - Sending mails fails, and must be retried multiple times. - Delays correlate loosely with US workdays (I'm in the US). Performance is consistently better at 1AM EST than at 2PM EST. - 0 connected apps. I haven't done extensive comparison to other accounts, but I believe that the number of messages is a cause of sluggishness. My mailboxes are > 120k messages. This causes problems with many mail clients; for instance, Sparrow (iPhone or OS X) is useless. I'm surprised that the GMail team hasn't figured out how to handle busy mail users, given the propaganda that all Google users use GMail. I'd love to have the option to pay for Day 1 performance in my GMail boxes.
- leemhoffman 14y agoIf your gmail is slow there is a simple and effective solution. I've had gmail for years and actually pay for my google apps account. Like the author I assumed my growing mailbox size and filters were the reason for the increasing slowness. So I contacted support and after some investigation they noticed that I had tons of polling requests that were slowing down my account from connected apps (think greplin). They suggested I remove them. I was skeptical, but I did. Immediately gmail was BLAZING fast again. If your gmail or google apps is slow I highly recommend removing all connected apps ASAP: https://www.google.com/accounts/IssuedAuthSubTokens https://www.google.com/accounts/IssuedAuthSubTokens
- kkwok 14y agoWow. Even if this doesn't speed it up, it's scary how many connected apps I had that I'd forgotten about.
- jim-greer 14y agoI don't really understand why 3rd party apps making requests to their servers would slow down your mail.
- hurstdog 14y agoI was coming to this page just to post a comment like yours above. Thanks for doing that. I work on the Gmail backend team and we regularly see blogs go by such as this one. The vast majority of the times that prominent bloggers report slowness it's because they do have tons of apps polling their account via IMAP or other sync methods. All of these apps end up competing for resources to your account with the web UI and thus you experience slowness. Internally we have accounts with upwards of 100G of mail still being very usable, so we know Gmail scales. Also we have quite a few people internally focusing specifically on finding and fixing these types of problems so that eventually it won't matter how many clients you have or how large your mailbox is, but these things take time. Gmail is a huge ship, we can't turn on a dime. So yeah, check that IssuedAuthSubTokens page and revoke access to any random services that you've tried out and forgot about. Hope that helps. -Andrew
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- brucehart 14y agoI've seen some speculation that Gmail slows down because your account is assigned to a server with other older accounts which are also growing and straining server capacity. Is it possible that the speed increase comes from being assigned to a new server more than the decrease in mailbox size? It would interesting to see someone test this by fully restoring their old account in a new account and comparing performance.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- egypturnash 14y agoThis is a complete tangent, but is anyone else getting tired of the growing number of Svbtle blogs? They all blend together, with only the upper-left image to tell them apart - and sticking them all into the same circle makes those images all have the same silhouette. The first appearance was cool, it was distinctive and unique. A breath of fresh air, even. But now it seems like a third of the links I hit from HN are Svbtlr blogs; it's starting to feel as generic and indistinguishable as last year's Wordpress theme.
- spullara 14y agoYeah, I basically assume they are all the same person.
- egypturnash 14y agoone described "Atlas Shrugged" as a great book recently. I don't know whch one but I just realized he basically kinda decreased the credibility for ALL Svbtle bloggers in my eyes. *awaits downvotes from Objectivists
- esrauch 14y agoI believe Atlas Shrugged is generally considered to be a good/interesting book, even by people who disagree with it's conclusions.
- gnaritas 14y agoThat's not my impression, I think it's generally considered terrible writing with one dimentional shallow characters. It's popular for its philosophy, not its quality as a book. I immediately lose a bit of respect for anyone who claims to like that book.
- quaunaut 14y agoCongratulations, you're an absolutist who thinks it is valid to sum someone up by a single opinion in the sea of human complexity.
- pilif 14y agoTo add data to the pool: I have 12 GB of email (all mail I ever received since 2001) in a (paid) Google Apps account and I do not experience an considerable slowdown for at least a year now. There were some issues with search before that (no other part was slow though), but that went away over time.
- ck2 14y agoThe slowness is probably how far apart your data is spread in the google "cloud" over the years. Map/reduce probably gets a heck of workout, imagine their entire global database size, it must be staggering. Maybe they can fix it by periodically rewriting the entire dataset for a single user onto a cluster that is much closer together. Once a year?
- habitue 14y agoCould this be the result of leaving everything in the inbox versus archiving it?
- zugheliang 14y agoI don't think so. I happen to archive EVERYTHING as I use the inbox TODO pattern. However, my temporary solution is to empty the trash email. I've also noticed that problems start to appear on the ~11 Gb range. As others have mentioned, I also pay for extra storage and it is painful to see my sparrow client timeout every 10 min.
- mycodebreaks 14y agoIf you decide to go back to your old email account, you'll end up having whole bunch of emails marked as unread. I don't know if there is a setting to forward an email and mark it read.
- nkurz 14y agoThis is a non-problem. There is an option on each filter to "Mark as read".
- JeremyBanks 14y agoYou can, you just need to set up a filter to do the forwarding rather than using the global forwarding option.
- forkrulassail 14y ago44.8 gig mail history. No speed issues, whatsoever.
- fayyazkl 14y agoThere is still a lot to admire. A few days back i pulled all of my email to Thunderbird only to discover a few differences between g vs hot mail. No pop account in hotmail, effectively every read message still appears unread in the online email client. By default hotmail had an option checked to "leaving only 14 days of email online". All the rest was virtually deleted and therefore existed only on my computer. There was an insane plugin to submit those all back to inbox without disturbing dates or subjects. However, that only resulted in hotmail access being revoked after 150 or so emails since there is some sort of cap on pushing emails at once to your account. The gmail contacts and email search resembles that of google as a search engine. No other comes near. Still there is a lot of opportunity to improve this. PG wrote a list of top ten products in which search was first and email was second. Sparrow might have been a good effort. Let's see when it evolves further.
- nyar 14y agoIf speed is what you're after then you can't beat a standalone, desktop, mail client.
- tsahyt 14y agoWhen my gmail was getting slower and slower I just dumped it and got myself a mailserver. It's overkill, yes, but it's a temporary solution (I've got some more in store for that box). In the meanwhile it's the fastest mailing experience I've ever had :) On a sidenote: The speed issues were not the reason for dumping gmail. Over the years my email address has caught the attention of too many spammers. Additionally I wanted to have my emails on one of my own boxes, not with Google.
- metalruler 14y agoSpeaking of slowdowns - until recently, a gmail login quietly set cookies by redirecting through multiple subdomains during the "Loading" prompt. Most notable was that it passed through accounts.youtube.com to set a cookie. It now seems to achieve this by using ocsp.thawte.com. Not sure how that works, I can't see any HTTP or HTTPS fetches from youtube during gmail login, yet it still manages to set a third party cookie. Can OCSP do this?