Gmail has become unusably slow

The Gmail team is most definitely aware of this and a fix is in the works. At SXSW this year there was a panel with four or five Gmail team members and this came up — they said it's related to the size of your inbox, and that it has a lot of Googlers complaining internally too, since many of them have the oldest/large accounts. Also see <a href="http://techcrunch.com/2010/03/14/gmail-slow/" rel="nofollow">http://techcrunch.com/2010/03/14/gmail-slow/</a>, though it has basically the same info.

<i>In a last ditch effort, I bought some extra storage from Google thinking maybe I'd get some kind of premium level service. So far, no.</i><p>Ah, to be Google! Your <i>competitors</i>, when frustrated by your poor service and unclear communications, <i>send you more money</i> in the vain hope it <i>might</i> help.

It's so rare that I use the actual GMail interface that I often forget how it even works, or how slow it is. Shortly after GMail allowed IMAP access, I hooked it up to my Mail.app and don't even bother with the web interface. It's so much more convenient, and it's rare that I've have problems when the cries of "GMail is down again" come about.

I definitely think there is room in the market for a new, online, paid email client. One that can connect to multiple outside accounts like Outlook, "infinite" storage, emphasis on privacy, gmail-style user interface, regular backups, and solid customer support. Email is extremely important to people and they don't want to worry about it. I wouldn't mind paying for a reliable and secure email client in the cloud.

Google says they're aware of the speed issue, that they have a solution, and that they're fixing it.<p><a href="http://techcrunch.com/2010/03/14/gmail-slow/" rel="nofollow">http://techcrunch.com/2010/03/14/gmail-slow/</a>

I've got &#60;8000 emails at around 2GB. Gmail seems to have been slow for the past couple of weeks, but it does vary. Usually 20-30 seconds to load Gmail; 15-20 seconds to open an email. 30 seconds or more to send.<p>I just hid chat, buzz and 'web clips'. I also set the theme back to classic. Not sure what did it (or if it was even something I did), but it's back to normal now, even if I turn everything back on.

I have all mail since 2001 (around 80'000 messages) in my google (apps, paid) account. While the web interface is still acceptably fast (as long as I don't browse my All Mail label), but the iphone (and ipad) frontend has become unbearably slow in the last few weeks.<p>It opens quickly, loads the locally cached page and then it's just spinning and spinning for up to 5 minutes before it either reloads the page completely, signs me out again or finally displays the new mail.<p>Considering this is a product from a company that places so much importance on speed, this is completely inacceptable, IMHO.

It continues to amaze me that a company as technically brilliant and pervasive as Google is so spectacularly bad at even rudimentary customer service.

Time for DuckDuckEmail, I say! :-)

interesting. i guess I have about 7k emails stored in my account. maybe 10 labels. a bunch of labs featues enabled. and everything is usually pretty instant for me. searches never take more than a second or two. There's an occassional hiccup, but nothing really troubling.<p>using chrome and FF on OSX

I was having the exact same problem when my account was using around 85% of the allowed storage.<p>I also had another account with very little emails stored and it was pretty fast.<p>My solution (quite lame): I redirected the "full" account to the other one and started to only use the later. So far no more problems...

As I was reading your article, I got an idea. Create Duck Duck Mail! Your search engine is awesome, and I bet your mail service would be awesome too!

Only 730 MB, 11309 messages here, and I can confirm that the service has been steadily slowing over the past three or four weeks. Loading my inbox from scratch can take well over 10 seconds, and I have reproduced this on multiple machines in my home and multiple machines on my corporate network. Starting new emails, sending emails, switching labels, all slow.

As an aside; is there a web based email service/client comparable to gmail? More particularly is there one which handles conversation view as well as gmail does? Until there is then gmail has a bit of a monopoly on users like me who love the client and everything that sets it apart from traditional email.

Well, at least it works. When I open it in Chrome I get:<p>The webpage at <a href="https://www.google.com/accounts/ServiceLogin?service=mail&#38;passive=true&#38;rm=false&#38;continue=https%3A%2F%2Fmail.google.com%2Fmail%2F%3Fshva%3D1%26ui%3Dhtml%26zy%3Dl&#38;ss=1&#38;scc=1&#38;ltmpl=default&#38;ltmplcache=2" rel="nofollow">https://www.google.com/accounts/ServiceLogin?service=mail&#3...</a> has resulted in too many redirects. Clearing your cookies for this site or allowing third-party cookies may fix the problem. If not, it is possibly a server configuration issue and not a problem with your computer.<p>(and of course, clearing cookies does not work)

I'm using over 5200MB, over 90,000 messages and 54 labels and haven't noticed any speed problems. Though the majority of my messages are archived, with only ~6000 in my inbox.

I think you've got to see this video really:<p><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rOtEQB-9tvk&#38;feature=related" rel="nofollow">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rOtEQB-9tvk&#38;feature=relat...</a><p>I think gmail is a fabulous product (imagine emails before gmail) and like every other agile product, it has its problems. The fact that we don't have to spend "any" money for storing gigs of our data on a secure and safe platform is probably enough for me to use it.

Browsing mail is still adequately fast for me; I have 33k threads and I don't have any problem loading up labels or switching back and forth from inbox to any other thing. I'm using 2GB of space.<p>I did find the search slow and inadequate though, so I downloaded and indexed all of my messages with Thunderbird and just use that when I want to search for something. I need to do an export to a conventional mbox or something soon, too.

My account was deactivated today for no apparent reason. It allowed me to reactive it by giving them my phone number. What's good Google?

I am running at 42% of storage. What I do is archive my messages every couple of weeks. I have noticed it always helps.

I also noticed that Google Apps (docs, etc.) really spikes my processor load. Anybody else experiencing this?

A few months ago my gmail was slow I deleted my mail down from 23k msgs to under 1000. I nuke all unstarred msgs from mailing lists, etc. Seemed to help. Although still not lightning fast (like the Chrome browser :-)).

My only complain is about loading time. It takes forever.<p>Compared to Google Reader, which loads the UI instantly, then loads the data, I say Gmail should work that way.<p>Don't let me stare at a white page with a retarded progress bar for a minute.

It was extremely slow for me for a couple of days (so slow it was unusable) but then it fixed itself. Seemed more like a temporary issue or bug than something related to inbox size.

"Gmail has become unusably slow"<p>If it's that bad, then it begs the question: why do you continue to use it? There's plenty of alternatives. Vote with your feet and let them know.

Would be curious to know if pop and imap are also slow

Serioously and i thought that it was just me. I'm so glad to have found GMail Users Not-so-anonymous!

I have 600 MB stuff there, and it certainly beats my corporate Outlook in speed...

I stopped using gmail a while ago. I use lavabit now and its so much better.

I had enough and switched back to the "Older Version". It's not bad that way.

Yet another reason to jump on the GTD bandwagon and have a 0 emails in your inbox policy.

It's still very fast here.