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Oops…Gmail Has a Penalty Button

Gears-enabling Gmail will be great, for those “unconnected” moments (hours), and I certainly hope they will avoid dumb mistakes that made Google Reader almost useless offline.

But for now, all I wish is a little more reliabilty.  Formerly rock-solid Gmail has been ill a lot lately.  The “Oops…the system encountered a problem (#500) – Retrying in 1:30” error message has became a daily occurance… in fact several times a day.

A minute and half is not that much – except that it’s not only waiting for the requested operation, it freezes up Gmail entirely.  So if you’re impatient, you’ll inevitable click the “Retry now” button. After all, that’s whay it’s there, isn’t it?

Wrong!  You’ve just found Gmail’s penalty button!  Every time you click it, the wait counter increases by a minute.

Still want to work, rather than go for coffee?  The only solution is to completely close the browser tab – sometimes the entire browser – then log back into Gmail again.

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Comments

  1. hit back on the browser and it loads page immediately

  2. It happens pretty regularly for me (especially with google apps). Frustrating.

  3. Of course Zoli (and as you no doubt realise) this all begs a few questions around free services. We’ve got so accustomed (yes – me too) to Gmail being free that we can’t cope with the potential reliability issues that comes with that model.

    Poll – who would pay $5/month for a Gmail service that was both reliable and added some of the more obvious features?

  4. I’ve encountered this a couple of times and it’s pretty annoying.

  5. Curtis Carmack says

    All the more reason to use Gmail in an application specific browser using FireFox 3 or Prism. At least that way you don’t have to shut down your browsing session to relaunch Gmail. I also use that method for Gcal, and anything else where the default size of the window I want is not the same as what I want my browser sized at.

  6. I have FF3 and encounter this frequently. I’d pay $5. for a little sanity, heck yeah!

  7. Diablonuva says

    i hear you guys, but how does one solve this issue?

Trackbacks

  1. […] somewhat jokingly called “retry now” Gmail’s Penalty Button, when I noticed every time I hit it the wait counter increased by a […]

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