Gmail as a Facade(jackg.org)
jackg.org
Gmail as a Facade
http://jackg.org/gmail-as-a-facade
18 comments
I 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
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
Sorry, but this isn't the case for me. IssuedAuthSubTokens shows a google talk authorization (bitlbee...), google calendar, and chrome.
But if I try subscribing to LKML for a few weeks, gmail becomes completely unusable.
But if I try subscribing to LKML for a few weeks, gmail becomes completely unusable.
I'm sorry that trick isn't working for you. As you mention LKML causes slowdown, it's possible that you're getting an inordinate amount of mail. It's also possible you've got an agressive IMAP client that isn't using one of those auth tokens (another common slowdown cause).
As I mentioned in a comment below* if this persists please to post on the help forums. There are people dedicated to helping there, and if it's a legitimate bug the backend team investigates and we fix the issues.
Hope that helps,
-Andrew
* http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4478100
As I mentioned in a comment below* if this persists please to post on the help forums. There are people dedicated to helping there, and if it's a legitimate bug the backend team investigates and we fix the issues.
Hope that helps,
-Andrew
* http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4478100
I'm the OP. Andrew, thanks for responding here. I have a ton of connected IssuedAuthSubTokens apps, but I've most of them are just accessing my Calendar, Contacts, etc. The only one that that has access to my Gmail is Baydin (Boomerang) which, as mentioned in the post, I am writhe to remove. But I wouldn't think that one connected Gmail app would be enough to cause slowness, would it?
It all depends. I don't know how Boomerang is implemented, but it's possible that with an account your size it's hitting some degenerate condition.
One of our support folks should be emailing you and they'll help debug where the slowness lies, on our side or through some other interaction. If it's a bug, we'll fix it up shortly.
One of our support folks should be emailing you and they'll help debug where the slowness lies, on our side or through some other interaction. If it's a bug, we'll fix it up shortly.
A little late to the party here, but Boomerang doesn't do anything at all except for when you Boomerang something and when it's scheduled to be sent/returned. The rest of the time, it doesn't make any API calls.
The response is much appreciated!
Suggestion:
Why not give the UI interface priority over other polls (allocate more bandwidth to it) for 5-10 minute chunks when its active?
Suggestion:
Why not give the UI interface priority over other polls (allocate more bandwidth to it) for 5-10 minute chunks when its active?
There are people working on those sorts of improvements, but it's not that straightforward so it takes time to get it right.
The reason that it's not that straightforward is that lots of operations change state in your account, so you need proper ordering of requests for everything that comes in if you want to ensure consistency. Furthermore when you do a UI operation you want it to happen now, and anything longer than that is frustrating. But if there is a large IMAP operation in the background, we can't just pre-empt that and re-start it because it might have already modified some state, not all changes are idempotent. So you have to wait, and you experience slowness.
Add in message delivery, various background operations for different features, android sync, different third-party add-ons that hit via IMAP or other sync protocols, and a stack that is more than a few layers deep and it gets very complex, very fast.
Hope that helps,
-Andrew
The reason that it's not that straightforward is that lots of operations change state in your account, so you need proper ordering of requests for everything that comes in if you want to ensure consistency. Furthermore when you do a UI operation you want it to happen now, and anything longer than that is frustrating. But if there is a large IMAP operation in the background, we can't just pre-empt that and re-start it because it might have already modified some state, not all changes are idempotent. So you have to wait, and you experience slowness.
Add in message delivery, various background operations for different features, android sync, different third-party add-ons that hit via IMAP or other sync protocols, and a stack that is more than a few layers deep and it gets very complex, very fast.
Hope that helps,
-Andrew
Hi Andrew, sorry to hijack the thread. Just wanted to say you guys are doing an amazing job at full-text email searching. Do you have any paper on that? I know Google publishes research papers and technical reports but couldn't find one about that.
Any pointer would be much appreciated. Thanks!
Any pointer would be much appreciated. Thanks!
Wow. Even if this doesn't speed it up, it's scary how many connected apps I had that I'd forgotten about.
Wow, thanks for that tip. I don't even use my gmail THAT often, but removing the connected apps I don't use has basically made opening my GMail instant (it would take a few seconds on the 'loading' bar previously)
That's probably just because everything is cached now. Connected apps can't make loading slower.
I don't really understand why 3rd party apps making requests to their servers would slow down your mail.
This 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.
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.
'Scuse my tangent from your tangent, but this whole subtle [sic] thing seems like the clubhouse for the cool kids. I don't like the cool kids. That's why I'm here amongst my uncool peers reading and discussing pointedly uncool topics.
But they too were once uncool, and it's hard to turn down exclusivity when it's offered.
Yeah, I basically assume they are all the same person.
one 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
*awaits downvotes from Objectivists
I haven't read Atlas Shrugged (I couldn't get more than a few chapters in), but it's completely possible to enjoy a book while not subscribing to its core thesis.
It's a fun mental exercise to temporarily adopt an extreme viewpoint and think it through to its logical conclusion.
If that's all the guy said, you are being too judgmental too quickly.
It's a fun mental exercise to temporarily adopt an extreme viewpoint and think it through to its logical conclusion.
If that's all the guy said, you are being too judgmental too quickly.
There are reasons to dislike (and be unimpressed by) Atlas Shrugged other than not subscribing to its core thesis.
I believe Atlas Shrugged is generally considered to be a good/interesting book, even by people who disagree with it's conclusions.
That it's a widely read book is not controversial, but Atlas Shrugged is generally considered to be a very polarizing book, even by its proponents. It tends to bring out extreme opinions when discussed. It's not surprising given that Ayn Rand very neatly divides her characters into good and bad, and does the same with society at large.
That said, many people, including Rand supporters would agree that as a work of fiction it's mostly a thin structure to put forth Rand's ideas. It could almost be a collection of essays, as the book is a collection of monologues and improbable conversations with very little time devoted to character development.
That said, lots of books with big societal ideas tend to have these issues but Rand is particularly ham fisted. Reading Atlas shrugged one gets the impression that she set out to write a novel but kept meandering onto the editorial page. By way of comparison, 1984 is a book with big ideas about society that are more subtly expressed (though Orwell can get preachy as well).
To reveal my own bias, I find her point of view a rather flimsy sort of egotism. It's the internal narrative of the tortured, misunderstood genius projected out to society at large. The galling thing about Rand's writings is the complete lack of understanding or compassion wrt the structural causes of inequity in society. It's a heavy handed, hateful, and facile way to view the world once put under a lens.
That said, many people, including Rand supporters would agree that as a work of fiction it's mostly a thin structure to put forth Rand's ideas. It could almost be a collection of essays, as the book is a collection of monologues and improbable conversations with very little time devoted to character development.
That said, lots of books with big societal ideas tend to have these issues but Rand is particularly ham fisted. Reading Atlas shrugged one gets the impression that she set out to write a novel but kept meandering onto the editorial page. By way of comparison, 1984 is a book with big ideas about society that are more subtly expressed (though Orwell can get preachy as well).
To reveal my own bias, I find her point of view a rather flimsy sort of egotism. It's the internal narrative of the tortured, misunderstood genius projected out to society at large. The galling thing about Rand's writings is the complete lack of understanding or compassion wrt the structural causes of inequity in society. It's a heavy handed, hateful, and facile way to view the world once put under a lens.
That'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.
Congratulations, you're an absolutist who thinks it is valid to sum someone up by a single opinion in the sea of human complexity.
How is one to refine their expectations of other people's abilities, if not by updating on available evidence?
Pot, kettle, incidentally. Compare parent's "I immediately lose a bit of respect" with your "you're an absolutist who [...]" The latter makes a much broader claim based on a similarly small piece of information.
Pot, kettle, incidentally. Compare parent's "I immediately lose a bit of respect" with your "you're an absolutist who [...]" The latter makes a much broader claim based on a similarly small piece of information.
You should work on your reading comprehension since I did nor said no such thing. Losing "a bit of respect" is not equivalent to summing someone up by a single opinion, it's not even close.
I don't get it. Are you arguing that one should not be able to adjust their respect for a person based on that person's political leanings and/or lack of literary taste?
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I like the book. I lose respect for anyone who just dismisses it out of hand because they think that's the cool choice.
But I agree that the plot and characters are shallow. The book was designed to showcase her philosophy and it does it well. I don't believe it was ever intended to be realistic, and I think it fell a little short of being entertaining a lot of the time. It was far too long. It was still far better than a lot of other fiction books I've read.
What I get out of the book (which I've read 3 times) is a different look on self-worth and self-sacrifice than all the rest of society gives. I believe people would be better off if everyone acted in a rational manner to promote their own interests. (It's not actually rational to hurt others to promote yourself. In the long run, that's a losing strategy.) I also believe that this will never actually happen, and so compromises are in order.
I believe that book has helped me form a better sense of my own worth, and was at least partially responsible for me leaving a job and getting a 40% raise at the next one. It's not the only factor, but it helped to be able to objectively assess my value to the company, as well as how much I value my own time.
Does that mean I'm a card-carrying Objectivist who doesn't give to charity? No. It means I'm a more rational person who evaluates things a little more clearly. In fact, I actually give to charity more now than before, so the book can hardly be said to have hurt that. I do give for slightly different reasons now, though. Before, I gave because it was the thing to do. Now, I give because I want that charity to work. If I give to the Red Cross, it's because I want them to help sick or hurt people. If I give to Child's Play, it's because I want sick children to find a little bit of joy in their lives. Those things may seem obvious, but they weren't.
A good example is United Way. I don't give to them. Why? Because all they do is slice off a large percent (13% apparently) and give the rest to an actual charity. Before, I had never really considered this, and just bought into their propaganda.
"Of each dollar United Way collects, over 87 cents goes directly to valuable community services. " - http://www.forsythunitedway.org/faq.cfm
They used to be very vocal about how much went to a real charity, pushing that statistic in front of you like it was a good thing. That is not good. That 13% could be going to a real charity, too, and actually helping people.
So in the end, don't lose respect for people merely because they like something. You might not be seeing the whole story.
But I agree that the plot and characters are shallow. The book was designed to showcase her philosophy and it does it well. I don't believe it was ever intended to be realistic, and I think it fell a little short of being entertaining a lot of the time. It was far too long. It was still far better than a lot of other fiction books I've read.
What I get out of the book (which I've read 3 times) is a different look on self-worth and self-sacrifice than all the rest of society gives. I believe people would be better off if everyone acted in a rational manner to promote their own interests. (It's not actually rational to hurt others to promote yourself. In the long run, that's a losing strategy.) I also believe that this will never actually happen, and so compromises are in order.
I believe that book has helped me form a better sense of my own worth, and was at least partially responsible for me leaving a job and getting a 40% raise at the next one. It's not the only factor, but it helped to be able to objectively assess my value to the company, as well as how much I value my own time.
Does that mean I'm a card-carrying Objectivist who doesn't give to charity? No. It means I'm a more rational person who evaluates things a little more clearly. In fact, I actually give to charity more now than before, so the book can hardly be said to have hurt that. I do give for slightly different reasons now, though. Before, I gave because it was the thing to do. Now, I give because I want that charity to work. If I give to the Red Cross, it's because I want them to help sick or hurt people. If I give to Child's Play, it's because I want sick children to find a little bit of joy in their lives. Those things may seem obvious, but they weren't.
A good example is United Way. I don't give to them. Why? Because all they do is slice off a large percent (13% apparently) and give the rest to an actual charity. Before, I had never really considered this, and just bought into their propaganda.
"Of each dollar United Way collects, over 87 cents goes directly to valuable community services. " - http://www.forsythunitedway.org/faq.cfm
They used to be very vocal about how much went to a real charity, pushing that statistic in front of you like it was a good thing. That is not good. That 13% could be going to a real charity, too, and actually helping people.
So in the end, don't lose respect for people merely because they like something. You might not be seeing the whole story.
> But I agree that the plot and characters are shallow. The book was designed to showcase her philosophy and it does it well.
Which is what I said.
And I lose a bit of respect because her philosophy is terrible, she's basically a sociopath; the book and her philosophy entirely lack empathy.
> What I get out of the book is a different look on self-worth and self-sacrifice than all the rest of society gives.
Because society doesn't normally promote sociopathy.
If you took something good from it and didn't come out admiring the objectivist view, good for you, you're the rare exception, but the fact is nearly everyone I've ever met who likes that book likes it because they like the objectivist view and all think they're the John Gaults of the word. Rand makes them feel good about their complete lack of empathy and this book is an excellent thermometer for me to quickly avoid wasting time getting to know people I'm very likely not going to get along with anyway.
Which is what I said.
And I lose a bit of respect because her philosophy is terrible, she's basically a sociopath; the book and her philosophy entirely lack empathy.
> What I get out of the book is a different look on self-worth and self-sacrifice than all the rest of society gives.
Because society doesn't normally promote sociopathy.
If you took something good from it and didn't come out admiring the objectivist view, good for you, you're the rare exception, but the fact is nearly everyone I've ever met who likes that book likes it because they like the objectivist view and all think they're the John Gaults of the word. Rand makes them feel good about their complete lack of empathy and this book is an excellent thermometer for me to quickly avoid wasting time getting to know people I'm very likely not going to get along with anyway.
"It's not actually rational to hurt others to promote yourself. In the long run, that's a losing strategy."
Just a hint: there might be other reasons than "that's a losing strategy" to avoid hurting others to promote yourself.
Just a hint: there might be other reasons than "that's a losing strategy" to avoid hurting others to promote yourself.
Oh, I don't deny that. I was just addressing the typical argument that if people acted in their own interest, they'd screw over everyone else. I don't think that's the case, even without all the other reasons not to screw people over.
99% of the mentions of Atlas Shrugged I've seen use it as a target for mockery. Not just the "philosophy," but the writing style: it's practically a byword for turgid unreadability.
BTW, here's my favorite comment on Atlas Shrugged, starring Bob the Angry Flower: http://www.angryflower.com/atlass.gif
BTW, here's my favorite comment on Atlas Shrugged, starring Bob the Angry Flower: http://www.angryflower.com/atlass.gif
For a much longer (but, I think, insightful and amusing) variation on that theme, see http://bradhicks.livejournal.com/393124.html. Warning: not everything in the first paragraph is actually true.
The punchline of that joke is completely invalid: in the novel, the tycoons do in fact grow their own food. But then again, why bother to read an actual book when you can form your opinions based on hearsay?
Closest svbtle post I've seen that comes close to that is http://francispedraza.com/silicon-valley-is-gotham-are-users... , which refers to Atlas Shrugged as a 'great story'.
Yeah, that's the one. Interestingly enough, the back of my brain says the symbol on it has changed, and used to be the one found on http://blog.harjtaggar.com - which I now realize is supposed to be Superman with his cape flowing, but read before as 'some dude with a weird pointy head, I dunno, kinda looks like Jamaroquai's logo I guess'.
This seeming swap is surely, in part, the result of me not looking very closely at the logo. But it might also be a consequence of how de-emphasized the few touches of individuality are in the Svbtle scheme. I don't think "I'm at [author]'s site" when I hit one, I think "oh another Svtble site". It could probably even be fixed pretty easily by filling the whole sidebar with the color and having the white logo float in that, thus giving the brain an actual silhouette to parse out of the corner of my eye instead of 'uh it's a circle and there's something in it I dunno hey look at all this important text over here'.
YMMV, of course.
This seeming swap is surely, in part, the result of me not looking very closely at the logo. But it might also be a consequence of how de-emphasized the few touches of individuality are in the Svbtle scheme. I don't think "I'm at [author]'s site" when I hit one, I think "oh another Svtble site". It could probably even be fixed pretty easily by filling the whole sidebar with the color and having the white logo float in that, thus giving the brain an actual silhouette to parse out of the corner of my eye instead of 'uh it's a circle and there's something in it I dunno hey look at all this important text over here'.
YMMV, of course.
Their blog ID system doesn't compensate for it. The single color icons with generic shapes don't register. They need a face or some fancy complex visual. And it needs to be large.
Obviously you don't have this problem on Google+ and Facebook, you know you're on a different user's profile each time because you find the face first.
But maybe they don't care. I personally don't care if I can't tell them apart because I'll only look at the ID if they write something that interests me and those chances are incredibly low.
Obviously you don't have this problem on Google+ and Facebook, you know you're on a different user's profile each time because you find the face first.
But maybe they don't care. I personally don't care if I can't tell them apart because I'll only look at the ID if they write something that interests me and those chances are incredibly low.
I agree, and I'm working on fixing this problem.
Oh, cool. Consider my commentary in this thread as critique, not flames - it was really striking when it was just your personal brand, and if I didn't think the look and the content were both often interesting, I wouldn't have gone into as much detail!
That's like saying you're growing tired of twitter because all the tweets look the same. It's the content that's important.
[deleted]
The Twitter Bootstrap effect.
Not the same. Bootstrap is very flexible and while there are copycats that are aping the Twitter layout instead of simply using the framework, it's like complaining all {Windows,OSX,Linux} apps have the same buttons.
Non-copycat examples:
http://osclass.org/ http://asilofis.net/ http://hyperboria.net/
Non-copycat examples:
http://osclass.org/ http://asilofis.net/ http://hyperboria.net/
Hmm, 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?
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?
> 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.
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.
I have about 2.5 million emails in my work account and it still works really well, as a counter example. (I work at Google, on Gmail backend).
If you've debugged it yourself and can't get to a good resolution (which it looks like you have), please post in our help forums. There are a few people that are dedicated to reading the forum and helping users, and when they hit dead ends for various reasons they'll escalate to the backend team directly and we investigate and fix the account if there is a bug.
Gmail tends to work very well for heavy users, but as with all complex software there are edge cases. Sometimes people fall into those edges and if you escalate through the help forums we'll see a rise in specific types of user escalations and fix whatever bug is causing it.
Hope that helps, -Andrew
If you've debugged it yourself and can't get to a good resolution (which it looks like you have), please post in our help forums. There are a few people that are dedicated to reading the forum and helping users, and when they hit dead ends for various reasons they'll escalate to the backend team directly and we investigate and fix the account if there is a bug.
Gmail tends to work very well for heavy users, but as with all complex software there are edge cases. Sometimes people fall into those edges and if you escalate through the help forums we'll see a rise in specific types of user escalations and fix whatever bug is causing it.
Hope that helps, -Andrew
I have a free Google Apps account with ~2GB of mail.
I definitely saw the same symptoms for quite a while, which eventually got to the point of serious downtime last year. At some point, the last big downtime (over a day!) involved some sort of transfer to different infrastructure (and I wish I could remember the exact wording now), and since then it's been back to lightning fast.
There definitely seem to be some endemic issues, but they're only for certain slices of users, it seems.
I definitely saw the same symptoms for quite a while, which eventually got to the point of serious downtime last year. At some point, the last big downtime (over a day!) involved some sort of transfer to different infrastructure (and I wish I could remember the exact wording now), and since then it's been back to lightning fast.
There definitely seem to be some endemic issues, but they're only for certain slices of users, it seems.
Are you using an IMAP client? I think it can have the same effect as connected apps.
I'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.
No, 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.
Keeping 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.
I 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.
Try this: http://gmvault.org/
I 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.
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.
Thanks! 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.
I've been using gmvault for months without even a warning message. It's great.
The tool that I like to use for Gmail backups is a Python script called BaGoMa: http://sourceforge.net/p/bagoma/home/BaGoMa/
I 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?
Back 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.
I use getmail to retrieve my gmail to my local network every week. It works fine.
Sad, 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.
I'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.
To 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.
There were some issues with search before that (no other part was slow though), but that went away over time.
44.8 gig mail history. No speed issues, whatsoever.
There 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.
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.
If speed is what you're after then you can't beat a standalone, desktop, mail client.
When 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.
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.
Speaking 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?
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?
Huh, 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.
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.
The 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?
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?
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Could this be the result of leaving everything in the inbox versus archiving it?
I 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.
If 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.
You can, you just need to set up a filter to do the forwarding rather than using the global forwarding option.
This is a non-problem. There is an option on each filter to "Mark as read".
https://www.google.com/accounts/IssuedAuthSubTokens