Gmail Sucks
Monday, June 25th, 2007 by melissaI would love to be checking my email right now, but unfortunately, I can’t. That’s because the folks at google mail (”gmail”) simply cannot seem to get their act together these days. Often when I try log onto my account, I get either a cutesy littel “Oops” message or the following message:
We’re sorry, but your Gmail account is currently experiencing errors. You won’t be able to log in while these errors last, but don’t worry, your account data and messages are safe. Our engineers are working to resolve this issue.
Please try logging in to your account again in a few minutes.
Yeah, right. A few minutes. Sure, I’ve tried that. For about a half hour. In the past when this has happened, I’ve tried emailing the gmail people once I finally am able to log on, so that I can tell them just how much their product sucks. They sent me a lovely little email that basically said, yep, we were having a problem, but it appears to be fixed now. But let us know if it happens again. Super. So now I imagine I’m supposed to save the gmail customer support email address in my hotmail account so I can email the gmail people from hotmail, because if my gmail isn’t working at the time, that’s really the only way I’m going to be able to contact them, isn’t it?
Rebecca just emailed the gmail customer support people, copying my hotmail account so that they can get in touch with me to rectify the problem. Which begs the question: Why don’t I just migrate my email life back to hotmail and forget gmail ever existed? The bells and whistles of gmail are nice, sure, but only if the basic email functionality actually WORKS. Which it doesn’t right now. So what’s the point?
The bottom line: Can the bells and whistles, gmail, and just develop an email interface that actually does what it’s supposed to do–allow users to log on and send and receive messages.
