February 24, 2009

Gmail Is Down. What to Do?

The web interface is one of the ways to access Gmail and you can choose from many flavors of web-based Gmail. If the standard web interface doesn't load, it's a good idea to try the more secure SSL interface at https://mail.google.com or the basic HTML mode at http://mail.google.com/mail/h.

Gmail also offers other ways to read your email: you can use POP3 or IMAP in almost any email client for desktop or mobile phones. If you use Windows, you already have Outlook Express or Windows Mail, but you can install a better application like Thunderbird. Before opening a mail client and entering Gmail's settings, it's important to enable POP and IMAP from this page (Gmail settings/ Forwarding and POP, IMAP). POP and IMAP access is disabled by default and it can only be enabled from the web interface.

Gmail's web interface was down for more than 2 hours today. "If you've tried to access your Gmail account today, you are probably aware by now that we're having some problems. Shortly after 9:30am GMT our monitoring systems alerted us that Gmail consumer and businesses accounts worldwide could not get access to their email." The only way to access your mail was using a mail client, but the POP/IMAP access had to be already enabled from Gmail's settings page.

What can we learn from today's outage? It's important to know that there are alternate ways to access Gmail and you should enable POP and IMAP, even if you don't intend to use them regularly.

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35 comments:

  1. CarsonFebruary 24, 2009 at 7:33 AM

    if for personal computer, i always use local software to get emails from different agents.

    i use gmail interface just only when i am at the public areas or wanna save some files.

    ReplyDelete
  2. albnixFebruary 24, 2009 at 7:41 AM

    1 - tale a big cup of coofee
    2 - subscribe a professional mail service if you really need it

    ReplyDelete
  3. AnonymousFebruary 24, 2009 at 7:59 AM

    Good advice Alex, lot of people panicked for no reasons and are calling it Gfail in Twitter. I have been using Gmail for the past 6 years seldom had any major problems with it. They could have used your suggestions instead of panicking.

    ReplyDelete
  4. U'nikFebruary 24, 2009 at 8:20 AM

    I have IMAP enabled, but I wasn't be able to access Gmail this way too.

    ReplyDelete
  5. AnonymousFebruary 24, 2009 at 8:23 AM

    Forwarding did not work during the outage either.

    ReplyDelete
  6. ParkylondonFebruary 24, 2009 at 8:45 AM

    All good points and now in Delicious for the next time Gmail becomes Gfail.

    However. It would have been nice to have:
    G-volk let us know that these alternatives exist.
    G-volk let us know what was going on.
    updates through Twitter (the @google account is there...)

    Communication please.

    ReplyDelete
  7. ParkylondonFebruary 24, 2009 at 8:46 AM

    And yes I know this isn't an official Google blog - but they do monitor it. And using the Google Groups is worse than useless. I'd get more feedback talking to a tree.

    ReplyDelete
  8. AnonymousFebruary 24, 2009 at 9:07 AM

    did anyone test if gmail was still usable with gmail offline feature enabled? the tool is made so we can still email without internet and then sends the messages when internet becomes available.
    But i'm very curious what happens when you do have internet but gmail is down. does it still work, keep your messages in the outbox and then sends them when gmail is back online.

    this would make the outage less dramatic for me

    ReplyDelete
  9. AnonymousFebruary 24, 2009 at 9:44 AM

    Gmail offline is so buggy that I had to turn it off.

    ReplyDelete
  10. AnonymousFebruary 24, 2009 at 10:32 AM

    About the IMAP: when activated, can I download all my mails since the opening of my Gmail account ? And what about the mails I've sent, can I also get them back?

    Is there a way to make backup of mails in Gmail? Some sort of CVS?

    ReplyDelete
  11. UnknownFebruary 24, 2009 at 11:21 AM

    No problem for me, I am Gmail-backup (http://www.gmail-backup.com/) user - all my mail is also on my laptop backed up.

    I use Gmail offline, but it shows me "error" page. So it is not very robust solution, although I am using it "offline" sometimes and it is handy.

    ReplyDelete
  12. UnknownFebruary 24, 2009 at 12:00 PM

    I wasn't able to access gmail via imap for at least some of today, nor was the S60 gmail client able to access gmail, so it wasn't *just* http access that wasn't working.

    ReplyDelete
  13. RexelFebruary 24, 2009 at 1:15 PM

    Well if I can't access my mail on google, which is my significant personal and side-biz stuff then I get back to my real job and do other things. It's really not that bad when the 'cloud' goes away for a while, people understand and you have a chance to get a magazine out or something. If the net goes for 25+ minutes then you start thinking about ducking out for a haircut. My life didn't end with the lack of gmail, did anybody else's?

    ReplyDelete
  14. macbeachFebruary 24, 2009 at 2:57 PM

    If you are going to enable POP mail it would be a good idea to run it from time to time, otherwise if you wait for months between times using it you might have to wait minutes to hours to get to your current messages when you finally do.

    ReplyDelete
  15. Alex ChituFebruary 25, 2009 at 1:01 AM

    Here's the explanation for Gmail's outage:

    "Lots of folks are asking what happened, so we thought you'd like an explanation. This morning, there was a routine maintenance event in one of our European data centers. This typically causes no disruption because accounts are simply served out of another data center.

    Unexpected side effects of some new code that tries to keep data geographically close to its owner caused another data center in Europe to become overloaded, and that caused cascading problems from one data center to another. It took us about an hour to get it all back under control."

    ReplyDelete
  16. StijnFebruary 25, 2009 at 2:27 AM

    I could access my gmail trough the off line mode . Whenever there was a new mail, it automatically synced my mails. First time I actually used the off line feature.

    ReplyDelete
  17. AnonymousFebruary 25, 2009 at 4:06 AM

    How should we sign out from thunderbird. It doesn't contain that option.

    ReplyDelete
  18. AnonymousFebruary 25, 2009 at 7:19 AM

    Although
    - I could have other ways besides the on-line web interface to access Gmail,
    - Gmail is free and perhaps it is not a professional email service,
    - my life could perfectly continues without Gmail (if Gmail has some problems),
    I will be always be looking carefully if Google is showing respect to their clients by, not only solving but also explaining clearly what the truth is when problem appears, not only in Gmail but also in all other services. Otherwise, I think Google is digging slowly its own grave.

    ReplyDelete
  19. AnonymousFebruary 25, 2009 at 8:03 AM

    I agree.

    First, Acacio Cruz -Gmail Site Reliability Manager- talks about "We’re working very hard to solve the PROBLEM..." in http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/02/current-gmail-outage.html. The explanation posted there was insufficient.

    Then, he titles "UPDATE on Gmail" in http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/02/update-on-gmail.html. The explanation posted there was insufficient, too.

    Now, Alex Chitu tells us that Google says "Lots of folks are asking what happened, so we thought you'd like an explanation". If Google would think smart, then they would write "We owe you an explanation". Now, the explanation is sufficient.

    If Google were my customer and the situation were the same, Google would have ask me and I would have to respond its questions.

    ReplyDelete
  20. George B. MogaFebruary 25, 2009 at 12:53 PM

    I have just noticed that I no longer can copy messages to the GMail servers using an IMAP client. The client (thunderbird) fails to connect when I give the copy command from another local folder. Copying between diferent GMail folders still works. Anyone else seeing this? Could it be related to the outage?

    ReplyDelete
  21. Larry-bobFebruary 25, 2009 at 7:51 PM

    Hmmm... looks like tonight it's Google Calendar's turn to be down.

    ReplyDelete
  22. flyingtofuFebruary 27, 2009 at 4:55 PM

    It's 2/27 7:50 or so and i can click to my g-mail inbox OK but no mail will open and i have an important piece of mail i cannot open and a box pops up and claims it is due to interconnectivity problems which is not true for everything else is smooth and fast -- if i could only mark/check a piece of mail for forwarding and have an address box only pop up so that could be sent to another box so google could fix the problem at their leisure. I went the html route via googles central help but it was the same thing. I can not understand all the stuff in the boxes above. I am a content-creator not a computer geek.

    ReplyDelete
  23. AnonymousApril 29, 2009 at 8:40 PM

    Backup gmail (including labels) regularly is necessary, free tool is available ( gmail-backups.com), but if you want to save your time by automating the backup jobs, check http://gmailkeeper.com

    ReplyDelete
  24. AnonymousSeptember 1, 2009 at 1:20 PM

    Gmail down again now! Well.. Google needs to do some thing about these outages..

    ReplyDelete
  25. AnonymousSeptember 1, 2009 at 1:33 PM

    yep. down it is..

    ReplyDelete
  26. AnonymousSeptember 1, 2009 at 1:33 PM

    Down for me too!! Was last week too for 5 hours

    ReplyDelete
  27. AnonymousSeptember 1, 2009 at 1:43 PM

    not working right now.....

    ReplyDelete
  28. AnonymousSeptember 1, 2009 at 2:04 PM

    What happened? Is it hackers? is it the MagicJack buy back offer letter?

    I NEED MY GMAIL

    (very sad)

    ReplyDelete
  29. AnonymousSeptember 24, 2009 at 8:02 AM

    Not working on Sept 24, 2009 either.

    ReplyDelete
  30. AnonymousOctober 6, 2009 at 11:10 AM

    down again....most unreliable these days.
    wish Google would get it together!

    ReplyDelete
  31. AnonymousNovember 30, 2009 at 10:06 AM

    Gmail not working. I tried from the morning till 7 PM, but nothing.

    ReplyDelete
  32. AnonymousDecember 19, 2009 at 7:53 PM

    Has GFail returned?

    ReplyDelete
  33. AnonymousMarch 7, 2011 at 8:51 AM

    Lesson learned the hard way you get what you pay for. GMAIL is FREEWARE and unstable.

    ReplyDelete
  34. AnonymousApril 14, 2011 at 12:36 PM

    Lesson learned the hard way you get what you pay for. GMAIL is FREEWARE and unstable.

    ReplyDelete
  35. AnonymousSeptember 4, 2011 at 9:24 AM

    Today 4 Sep 2011 I got sooo many troubles trying to open gmail to no avail.....

    ReplyDelete

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