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September 25, 2008

The Best Gmail Error Message

You can't get a funnier error message than this:

Dear valued user,
You have reached the error page for the error page...
You win!!


Sometimes even the error pages can't be displayed and you need to come up with a plan B. Gmail's meta-error page is simple, yet effective: Google can't always win.

This reminds me of a similar error message from Google Reader: "Oops! That wasn't supposed to happen".


{ The first screenshot is licensed as Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial by Viofiddler. The second one is licensed as Creative Commons Attribution by Ashley Dryden. }

27 comments:

  1. Error messages? From Google?!
    Well hey, it happens.
    Thanks for the laugh!

    ReplyDelete
  2. I like it and that's why still in BETA.

    ReplyDelete
  3. I still like the error page in germany for www.gmail.com that says (translated from German):
    Dear User,

    in Germany our email service is called Google Mail, not gmail.

    You can get your emails directly by typing in http://mail.google.com.

    Your Google Team.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Haha... that's funny though. Google sometimes make things light by adding fun like this... that's good.

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  5. I just love the youtube internal server error.

    "A team of highly trained monkeys has been dispatched to deal with this situation"

    ReplyDelete
  6. This is why we love Google.

    ReplyDelete
  7. Google accidentally the error page.

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  8. Regarding "error page in germany", thats because gmail.de is a completely other company, and to not infringe on the trademark (even google has to obey that) the have to write like that.

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  9. The second one, well, every reasonable programmer uses this error message from time to time. They aren't supposed to survive to production system though, I guess.

    The first one is good.

    ReplyDelete
  10. I've met with fallowing on while using orkut:


    Bad Google, no doughnut for You today!

    ReplyDelete
  11. I got an error from Google Chrome a couple days ago. I don't have a screenshot but it was something like "Whoa! Chrome crashed!" As though they were shocked that it happened.

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  12. In the 1960s, IBM distributed a 'beta' Fortran compiler. Fortan numbered the lines and the error listing was at the bottom i.e.; "Syntax error in line 12" or "Undefined variable in line 23". One version listed all the errors, then stated "Note: there is an error in the error message numbering."

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  13. Google always has some of the best error messages.
    Its, as Anon said, why we love Google.

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  14. What happens if there's an error on the error pages error page?? I think you can see where i'm going with this... :o)

    Nice to see that Google can still make fun of itself - i'd like to slip some of these 'easter eggs' into our web app but i'm not sure if the company would approve of it (although in a pre-release build we made all of our legal links go to a rick-roll... good times)

    http://www.samalamadingdong.com

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  15. This reminds me of a Placeware (now Microsoft Live Meeting) error message from years ago. If you attempted to schedule a meeting with attendees: 1 you got a pop up message that stated (it's been so long I'm probably paraphrasing): Please select at least 2 attendees because meetings with only 1 person are not very fun.

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  16. I know this isn't exactly relevant, but I did find it quite amusing. Please visit my page to see the blog. Apparently Microsoft doesn't know their own operating system. You'll see.

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  17. How someone could license a SCREENSHOT? :P
    Is SCREENSHOT a form of art? Is it a masterpiece? Is it someone's unique work? That "intelectual property" stuff is starting to reach a crap point...
    -_-'

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  18. When you uninstall Google Chrome, the confirmation dialog box has a "Was it something we said?" tagged on at the end :)

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  19. I love this. It is great. These laughs are great.

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  20. you want to see Azerbaijani, Interlingua, Basque, Latin, Breton, Luxembourgish, Mongolian, Visayan, Papiapmento, Quechua, Somali and Surinamese to be added

    ReplyDelete
  21. I like the Firefox one when it crashes and it says something like "How embarrassing something went wrong"

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  22. Relating back to that post about the YouTube error message, I recall that dealing with the problem correctly gets you a message that says something along the lines of "Thank you, the monkeys are happy with their bananas"

    Also, I've recently received error mail messages in gmail. They're emails that are from noreply@google.com and they just say "--error--" in the title and "--error--" in the body.

    Strange.

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  23. Call Gmail customer support team and resolve the issues related to Gmail account by dialing the toll free Gmail help line number. You have to get in touch with Gmail technical associates and you feel that there are issues in using your Gmail account and you need proper solution.https://www.buzzfeed.com/jiprinojit/gmail-support-services-to-resolve-2hmtt

    ReplyDelete

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