Gmail's Second Major Problem

The issue that you're complaining about was due to the incident linked at [1].<p>I can't go into the technical details as to why this happened, but I can roughly explain that it was due to the CAP theorem, essentially "Consistency, Availabilty, Partition Tolerance. Choose two." [2]<p>Furthermore, you have to choose partition tolerance [3]. The delivery delays that were seen yesterday is because we choose consistency over availability in our systems.<p>In fact, most of the outages I see people complain about on Hacker News related to Gmail are because we won't sacrifice consistency of user accounts. It's a different problem than huge scale serving of web search indexes or facebook timelines because in those cases if you're missing a few entries most people won't notice or care. When you're searching for an email, you know what email you expect to find and you'll get angry if it isn't there.<p>Users won't stand for an email showing up one day, disappearing next hour, and then coming back later (which is what could happen in some designs for eventual consistency when serving from different datacenters).<p>Thus, Gmail availability is lower sometimes because we make sure that all of your data is there all the time. We're insane about it, and we have huge jobs that run constantly on our systems to ensure that we're even resilient to bad hardware. With those we regularly find single bit errors and bad CPUs.<p>So, as a Gmail engineer, I'm sorry that there were delivery delays yesterday, and all I can say is that every time these happen we tweak and redesign our systems to make these more rare and to improve Gmail's uptime. We'll never have the snappy response and perfect uptime[4] of a computer under your desk. But at the same time a hurricane could take our one of our datacenters and we won't lose your data.<p>-Andrew, a Gmail Engineer.<p>1. <a href="http://www.google.com/appsstatus#hl=en&#38;v=issue&#38;ts=1359100799000&#38;iid=8a775c169a6d52d33eea2ba9c2919a6e" rel="nofollow">http://www.google.com/appsstatus#hl=en&#38;v=issue&#38;ts=13...</a> 2. <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CAP_theorem" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CAP_theorem</a> 3. <a href="http://codahale.com/you-cant-sacrifice-partition-tolerance/" rel="nofollow">http://codahale.com/you-cant-sacrifice-partition-tolerance/</a> 4. For some definitions of perfect.

The author is furious about a technology that was not designed for instantaneous delivery (SMTP) and fumes about it, because it isn't instantaneous. What's worse is, he quickly assumes goes into some kind of 'super-hero mode' and makes a pretty heavy claim that this is Gmail's <i>second biggest problem</i>.<p>I think this is the best approach - If someone hands over you a free glass of wine, which they've tried their level best to make it perfect, you just drink it instead of trying to suddenly become a food critic and blame the person who gave you the beer. If you don't like it, don't drink it. Buy your own beer from somewhere else. As simple as that!<p>Tell you what, you should try Yahoo!, I bet.

Your problem is that you're relying on a method of communication that was never guaranteed to be instantaneous. Maybe you should investigate other forms of communication within your team besides (or in conjunction) with email.

I pay over $800 a month for Gmail (ok, for apps for business for many users), and we STILL have this issue, and while we can indeed call Ireland to get support, the answer is always, "We are having a delivery issue. Our engineers are working on it."<p>So paying doesn't help.

Whaaat, SMTP != Instant Delivery!? You must be joking!<p>As much as i can understand the pain of an email not being delivered after 2 hours this seems to be too much drama. "happens 2 times in a month" is not a "major problem" for a free service especially since i suppose this user is part of a rather small minority. I never noticed substantial delivery lags myself over the past years myself.<p>Anyway, if you say "i'd pay 50$/month" please email me, i'll be happy to provide you with a very overprized mail account with same-second delivery! :)

Looks like Greylisting to me: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greylisting" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greylisting</a>

I had seen massive delays in delivery to Gmail when sending newsletters at my last $dayjob, and I had always assumed it was part of their spam filtering. For example, if it were me and I was getting thousands of nearly-identical emails sent to Gmail addresses, it seems like a good idea to let 1% of them through to see if end users mark them as spam or not. If they all get marked as spam, I don't need to let the rest through.

Are you hitting any of their receiving limits? <a href="http://support.google.com/a/bin/answer.py?hl=en&#38;answer=1366776" rel="nofollow">http://support.google.com/a/bin/answer.py?hl=en&#38;answer=1...</a><p>Because this is exactly what happens when you do.

i wish some major computer company would release an easy-to-use plug and play server product that would enable consumers to run their own mail servers on cheap hardware, just by toggling a switch<p>just imagine... no ads, no privacy concerns, complete control.<p>if they were smart they would include some sort of automatic backup program that runs in the background and saves everything every once in a while, a backup that could be restored with a click of a button... like going back in time ... like a .....

Even though I agree with people here saying that you can't expect 100% instantaneous delivery from SMTP, this incident was actually posted on the Google Apps status dashboard ( <a href="http://www.google.com/appsstatus#hl=en&#38;v=issue&#38;ts=1359118799000&#38;iid=8a775c169a6d52d33eea2ba9c2919a6e" rel="nofollow">http://www.google.com/appsstatus#hl=en&#38;v=issue&#38;ts=13...</a> ).<p>So it's not even like this is some common problem that happens all the time and Google is ignoring. No service is perfect and outages happen.

My main gripe against GMail is the visual noise and clutter. There are way too many buttons and gradients and shadows now.<p>I remember in private beta, it's cleanlisness was heralded as the second coming, but now they seem to be adding features 90% of users don't need.<p>I've switched to Outlook.com and haven't looked back. Back to cleanliness and non-introsive buttons and popups.

I'd say the #1 problem is spam filtering, which for me has gotten worse and worse. Recently I have had PayPal payment notifications going into spam! It's a shame because Gmail used to have incredibly good spam filtering - good enough that I didn't check it, as I knew I could trust it - however now I don't trust it at all.

kapilkale, for the price you say you'd pay a month, you could get Google Apps for Business and spend that much per year. And get live support and other goodies.<p>Have you thought about this yet?

$50 -&#62; $1000 is one order of magnitude.<p>Not "orders".<p>Orders of magnitude hyperbole needs to stop.<p>Why not write "some would pay $1000 a month" when quoting the Graham article. You didn't even show you have users willing to pay $5000 a month for gmail which would in be the "orders of magnitude" you wrote.

95% of non-spam email is delivered within 5 minutes of being sent. This number is made up for the purposes of argument, but I think it's fairly accurate. I've administered mail machines for many years.<p>There are all sorts of reasons why the other 5% doesn't zip along, and some of those reasons are persistent, some are fixable, and some of them are essentially never going to be tracked down. Does Gmail have an internal problem? Maybe, maybe not, but there's not enough data here to find out.<p>If you want instant communication, use a direct connection under your control. It's still not guaranteed but at least you'll see the progress or lack thereof.

I've had massive delivery delays every so often with gmail and they're a little irritating, sure, but quite frankly email makes no guarantees about delivery time. If you need guaranteed fast delivery maybe email isn't the answer.

Google's servers are incredibly complex. Probably too complex - the more complicated they make their infrastructure (datacenter failover, region failover, bla bla) the more unstable it seems to get.<p>Google uses a very bureaucratic code commit system that requires sign offs from different people. This process takes a long time, and devs can't move onto the next step until the previous step has been accepted [1]. While this system is awesome for catching the localized bugs (no buffer overflow is going to get past that kind of code review), there is a major tradeoff. A dev can only keep so much state in mind when building architecture. If he is only working on the problem once a week with large time gaps, is he not going to lose track of important pieces of the puzzle?<p>This is probably the age old problem - if you make something that is too clever for even the creator to fully understand, how are you possibly going to make sure it is bug free? The problem being some delay between Google servers hints at an inter-region datacenter problem. I wonder if anybody at Google even understands the entire failover and interlinked data center system completely?<p>[1] <a href="http://www.splinter.com.au/2012/12/26/behind-enemy-lines-google/" rel="nofollow">http://www.splinter.com.au/2012/12/26/behind-enemy-lines-goo...</a>

Never had any latency issues or lag in delivery. I wonder if this is some sort of regional issue.

I experience this same issue a couple of times a month as well. I happen to have a few plugins that I use in GMAIL (Xobni/Tout/Base etc) so I assumed that might be part of the problem? Are you running Gmail clean or do you have a similar situation?

Gmail seems pretty good to me at least. The worst trouble I've had is a few seconds of delay to receive an email without a refresh. Usually my phone and tablet get it first.

try using Yahoo, Gmail will suddenly feel like a supersonic jet

Anecdotally, I wonder if the reason I don't see this as much as I used to is because the quick email discussions I have happen almost entirely between Gmail users.

The solution is cheap and simple: FAX. It starts coming out on the other end before you're finished putting it in!

I've been using Zoho mail myself for a while, and it's worked out fairly well.

Something else to lament: their complete lack of support for webhooks.

Try Yahoo or Hotmail(Outlook now), then you may get the answer.

"Take my money. I’d pay $50 / month to get reliable service; others would be willing to pay orders of magnitude more."<p>Should be "order of magnitude more".<p>Getting really tired of tech writers using "orders of magnitude" hyperbole when its not really the case.<p>----<p>Also don't like him complaining on not receiving an "urgent" email in time. Urgent communications require phone calls.