The Mystery Of The Disappearing Google IMAP
The other day I thought I was finally going senile and I started to get ready to check myself into the local psychiatric hospital. Because in the blink of an eye, the little online problem had corrected itself and my brain convinced me that I had dreamt the whole thing up.
But now today, catching up on my RSS feeds, I’ve realised I didn’t dream up my problem after all. My Google email IMAP really did disappear for about a half hour. Lots of other annoyed users can back me up on it. Phew, thank God. I can cancel the order for the strait jacket.
In case you don’t know what IMAP is, Peter did a post on it last October when Google rolled the feature out to great acclaim. But the other day, the whole thing just blinked out for a short while (some reports said 45 minutes), leaving users holding their you-know-what in their hands. The IMAP option totally disappeared from the Gmail settings altogether :
So what does this mean for the ordinary user? Well not having IMAP meant that no email was being synchronized between computers for that 30-45 minutes. So it meant some inconvenience for email users, especially those who use email for business like I do. I am running between computers at the moment so I am experimenting with the IMAP function to see how it works. So it was a bit of a pain not having everything synchronized.
OK, I’m a big boy so I know it doesn’t mean the end of the world. We’ll still see the sun coming up tomorrow but it does make you stop and think for a minute. This is Google we’re talking about - the high and mighty powerful Google empire with their bottomless bank accounts - and they’re fallible. With all the money they have, they can’t keep their IMAP servers up. Why did they crash? Will we get an official explanation why it crashed? As yet I haven’t heard anything from Google remotely resembling an explanation, in fact they haven’t even apologised!
I noticed that on Wednesday, too, and even restarted my computer twice thinking it was a local problem. Google slides/rides a lot on its reputation at this point, so much so it was my *last* conclusion that the problem was on Google’s side. If experience is any indicator, there will be no apology at all - not even the less traditional business:client, more buddy:buddy kind of apology that newer web businesses give (like Last.Fm’s downed server notice yesterday). Even an explanation is hard to come by, and often only appears by a single Google employee in user forums after hundreds of users have continued to insist on why a problem happened in the first place.
And I’m a huge Google fan. I push Google products anywhere I can. I’m known as the “Googlehead” at work, the one who hears a problem and says, “Have you tried this thing Google made?”
But I have to admit that I’m not very good at defending myself when a non-devotee questions implicit trust in the services/products of a particular company, which in the end is just like any other company - fallible, run by humans with their own interests, not likely to show their hands and controlled in their actions only insofar as the number of laws and loopholes that apply to them. I put my head in the sand when I think of the day that there business model stops working… and it will, one day. It’s only evolution. One day, users will stop maintaining help forums, or there won’t be enough users left who know what they’re talking about. One day, they’ll put out a product that won’t work, that isn’t as innovative in its simplicity. One day they might just stretch themselves too thin. Hell, one day they might just lose their bank on an unsound investment.
I dread any of these events, but it is always there - the grain of sand in the Google oyster.
My emails are disappearing from 3 of my 4 computers? My computer Fix-it guy sid e set them up to be synchronized. We have actually witnessed the emails rolling off. I thought I was losing my mind! There are no emails to be found on the Earthlink server.
M Larsen, ‘one day’ might be here already, might be why we don’t see many explanations from G when things go wrong lately.
Maybe I am wrong but there isn’t an SLA for Gmail. From my experience you get what you pay for. In case these types of things happen again or something even more tragic it might be good to have a plan of action.
I’m not that computer savvy so keep that in mind if you have any answers for me. I save important info in two files–one marked “keeper” (like ticket info, emails I want to find later) and “passwords” (obviously for passwords to various sites). I just tried to look up some important hotel information and both files are empty. Huh? What happened??