[...] on GigaOm, Om has a little rant about the seeming performance issues with Gmail. Om complains about apparent disappearing emails [...]

[...] Om Malik thinks that “500 messages are nothing in this day and age, especially if you are in the information business as I am” and wonders why Google doesn’t list all these restrictions. [...]

[...] un servicio de software empresarial que sea seguro, disponible, integrable, fiable…? Hay quienes protestan de lo de hoy, [...]

[...] 25, 2008 On his blog, Om Malik complains about Gmail. He says it sucks because: Messages are either not getting sent or being lost by the system. [...]

[...] Om Malik thinks that “500 messages are nothing in this day and age, especially if you are in the information business as I am” and wonders why Google doesn’t list all these restrictions. [...]

[...] Does Your Gmail Suck Too?, GigaOM [...]

[...] Does Your Gmail Suck Too?, GigaOM [...]

[...] Om Malik认为500则消息没什么，特别是如果您和我一样，是做信息的业务，恨奇怪谷歌为什么不列出所有这些限制。 展开评论 (0) 折叠评论   By Hong Xiaowan @ 2008年06月26日 图片CC自Ionut Alex Chitu请注意：Ionut Alex Chitu和Google System不对本文负有任何责任 图片CC自文中更多链接中的，不再另外重申请注意：被链接的任何网页不对本文负有任何责任 function friendfeedCallback(obj){friendfeed_badge.init(”friendfeed”, obj);} document.write(”); tempwidth = 500;tag=cata01;username=”";count=10 p071(); p15(); p16(); p08(); q=”Gmail+OR+Spam”; google.setOnLoadCallback(initialize1); p09(); footer(); [...]

[...] Om Malik thinks that “500 messages are nothing in this day and age, especially if you are in the information business as I am” and wonders why Google doesn’t list all these restrictions. [...]

[...] it all happens in one spot. I was very surprised when I came across a Techmeme post titled “Does Your Gmail Suck Too?” Messages are either not getting sent or being lost by the system. Several people have [...]

[...] a growing opinion that the answer to that is no. Om Malik got stuck into gmail last [...]

[...] Om recently stirred the pot with his post on the problems that they’ve been having with Gmail / Google Apps. [...]

[...] it all happens in one spot.  I was very surprised when I came across a Techmeme post titled “Does Your Gmail Suck Too?“ Messages are either not getting sent or being lost by the system. Several people have [...]

[...] talked about Gmail sucking, but this is a bigger threat to productivity, since at some point it will drive me insane and [...]

[...] Google Apps replacing Microsoft software in UK Telegraph newsroom - Mind you, the respected Om Malik tried Gmail for his company recently and think it suck! [...]

[...] I will call Google later today and find out what is going on with the service. We have personally not suffered this outage so, I can’t get too worked up about it. My personal feelings about GMail as an enterprise mail solution are mixed. [...]

[...] Om Malik thinks that “500 messages are nothing in this day and age, especially if you are in the information business as I am” and wonders why Google doesn’t list all these restrictions. [...]

My Gmail is just great - I wouldn’t go back to another system if you paid me (and Google hasn’t/doesn’t pay me)

We are using Google Apps for our organization which provides 84 of our active members an email account. Unlike you guys, we haven’t had any issues so far. We’ve been with them since last year.

Sorry to hear that.

We have a school with 30 employees running on it for the past year, no issues at all.

Gmail has been fine for me since I switched late last year. I use the web interface on my Mac, and the Gmail IMAP implementation on my iPhone. That said, it’s a personal account not linked to Google Apps for a specific domain.

I am nit having your experiences; Gmail, for me, is one of the most reliable services I have ever used. I am possibly too dependent on it.

I would, however, like to have a video of Om Malik lighting a Chocolate Cigar with a burning wad of monopoly money!

I am using Google Apps for Domains. Switched from an outsourced Exchange provider roughly 6 months ago (for similar reasons as you stated).

The last week or so I have seen what you are talking about. I have periodic hanging when trying to send an email. I wouldn’t say that this has been a constant problem — more likely if it happens I’ll continue for three or four additional times within the space of a couple days - then things seem to go back to normal.

My iPhone seems less “lucky” with the imap integration to Gmail. I’ve always had lengthy “stalls” periodically when trying to retrieve email via the GMAIL imap setup. I can’t figure out if it’s my phone or GMAIL (I’m guessing GMAIL but have no proof).

For all that GMAIL can do wrong, it has several things I love.

First, if you’re on a Blackberry - you can get push email to your device without needing to use an expensive BES (Blackberry Enterprise Server). If you use one of the Sprint Simply Everything plans you won’t even need to pay for the BIS (Blackberry Internet Server).

Second, the spam filter is rock solid. On Gmail you would not even know that a Spam problem ever existed.

Last, I love that I get into Gmail with any web browser at any time.

Oh yeah — I do not miss the constant grinding away as some third party program struggles to index my outlook email. Instead I rely on Google to do all the searching of my inbox.

Overall I think the positives outweigh the negatives — however I admit - GMAIL can be frustrating.

Om,

Since you’ve given up smoking, I would suggest donating the $1200 to charity :)

- Adwait

Sorry to hear you’re having problems. I use the GMail web app for my person email, IMAP on my WinMo phone and also have lightly used the Google Apps email for my domain.

The only problem I’ve ever had was with IMAP when it was first released and they only tested it with the phone with the smallest market share (iCrap). HTML emails caused huge problems for WinMo users which account for a much, much larger market share and it took them several months to fix it. Hopefully all the angry WinMo users made Google realize how stupid it was to not test with the largest user base. Other than that I haven’t had any problems.

Like Mark said, I wouldn’t switch to another email system even if you paid me.

I am only using Gmail through IMAP, I have 2 Gmail accounts. One is working fine, the other keeps having some connections issues (password rejected sometimes, can’t update the folders, etc.). Which is weird since both accounts are set the same way in my email reader.

I am glad that I am not the only one with Gmail IMAP issues. Fortunately, I do not rely exclusively on Gmail. I guess we get what we paid for.

Apparently OM has not received the memo that Google is God and there will be no negativity spoken about them. The Google worshipers are very reason I stay away from them.

@Stacey Have you tried the Gmail Blackberry application? It supports threading. I’d be lost w/o it. Go to (link) on your blackberry and it should be a simple install. When you log in, you have to use your full email address for the username. You can also use the IMAP server with Blackberry’s mail application, but I don’t have any experience with that.

Om - Regarding messages not getting sent. Google Apps has a limit of 500 unique messages per day per account, which could explain why some people might not be able to send messages.

I moved my company to GAFYD and had issues with a site I run which delivers notification emails. I noticed that when we cut over, our delivery rates were terrible and un-earthed the limit via Google Groups. My solution to this problem was to not have GAFYD generate the email, which meant I had to put in place a SMTP server to send outbound email. Once this issue was resolved, everything worked perfectly.

Hope that helps.

I’ve been using regular Google Mail for a few years now. I just started using Google Apps for my own personal domain for the last 3 weeks. Both have been stellar.

I use gmail and Docs for personal use and love it. If you do choose to upgrade, I would be interested to see how your experience with google tech support goes.

I’ve been very frustrated with GMAIL lately. Lots of temporary errors (502s) and FF3 seems to be having problems loading the messages. GMAIL won’t respond in FF3 but work fine in Safari. Very frustrating since I manage all of my work and personal accounts via GMAIL.

I’ve been using Google Premier for over a year and have yet to experience any problems beyond times when it’s a little slow. That hasn’t happened very often.

gmail’s been great for us. I personally use the IMAP service on a regular basis and that works out well too. Gmails labels are IMAP folders so just add a / in the names of your labels on gmail for a nested folder structure.

Om,

I wish you had published this blog post 10 days ago. We just completed the migration of our email for the full mogulus.com staff and systems to Google Apps last Wednesday.
IMAP with Google Mail is a total nightmare - I’m about to switch back to POP… which hopefully will be more reliable. My blackberry works but somehow messages are lost/read…

I hope that your blog post will get things moving in the right direction at Google Apps - I certainly expected them to have cracked email outsourcing when I made the decision to switch and pay the pro fee.

Cheers,
Max

I am using it for my small business with no problems. I use the webmail as does the secretary and my partner uses Outlook without any problems. It has been a perfect solution to our needs but it’s only three people and we don’t have intensive needs.

Brian
(link)

The old, “I didn’t receive your e-mail” excuse? Did the sender receive an error message?

I completely sympathize! We could never find a robust & reliable solution for group/shared email (things like info@, etc.) and ended up building our own solution for internal use. Now we’ve turned it into a product for small business email management. (link)

Hope you find a great solution for your problem. Please post some updates on the direction you end up taking.

I have used it for my personal domain’s email every since Google Apps because available and oversee a few companies that use it with around 10 employees each. I have not had any of the problems you are talking about but everyone seems to use Mac OS X’s Mail and their phone’s IMAP applications and not the web interface. The only thing I have notices is occasional 30 minute time periods where the Gmail service is unavailable through IMAP and sometimes the web. It is maybe 2 times a month.

It seems unusual that you are having so many problems but the comments all seem very positive. You should seek out a larger group than yours that uses Gmail for their email services and see what experience they have. Get in touch with that Australian school.

we switched back to Exchange from Gmail a month back- the reps who sold us gmail came with fancy presentations- but beyond giving us a sub par product at subpar prices all they gave us were headaches!

no wonder they are able to sell it to the school system in australia- the teacher and kids at school do not require the kind of efficiency that a true business wants

@Stacey - My wife has been syncing her BB Pearl with GMail for ages. She even gets push email through it :-) I forget the setup process but it was really easy.

As for GApps, I migrated over about a month ago and it’s better than I expected. I only use it for mail, not calendar or anything, so that’s one caveat.

I would not advise anyone to use Gmail for business. For one, they dont try hard enough to deliver mail. It is not enough that they have high uptime, smtp mail must plan for downtime on receiving servers too. Second, successive attempts to deliver mail are often from different IP addresses, which can cause problems with greylisting spam filters setup on many domains. Further, their spam filters are overly aggressive for business use (businesses receive messages that may sound spammy, but are legitimate).

Worse, I think their cheerleaders stop any feedback from reaching them. The problem with lack of technical support is that you dont have that vital ear to the ground; you need to compensate that with sensible gathering of information from your user community.

But I am interested in knowing what specific problems you had with Zimbra that you chose to shift? Or were you being a Google fan boy? Serves you right if so.

OM,

What other providers would you consider as viable alternatives to the GMail service?

I am looking to transition our organization to GMail and succumb to the GGods but haven’t taken the plunge yet.

Perhaps we can benefit from your 20/20 hind sight!

BTW, what name did you finally end up giving your new puppy?

Alexander
Paris, France

Ever since they updated G-mail I’ve had continuous problems getting it to load, I have to either dump my browser cache or click the basic html option. Once in G-mail you do have the option to go back to the older version which works great, but you’re not able to set is as default(as far as I can see). G-mail is fantastic and I’d use it over any other mail system, I just wish they’d stop F-ing with it, it was fine in the first place.
Never had any lost mail either.

I don’t know about you Om, but I’ve been using the public version of GMail for a lot of time now, and it appears that none of the problems you mention happen. :)

I use gmail for my domain, but not google apps. I use pop3 technology to retrieve my email from the server into the GMail interface and I have never had any complaints. This way I can use GMail with my domain and it is free.

Chris

Om: we are having similar problems with Google Apps for our domain. IMAP and Outlook problems, lost email or late delivery. It’s very frustrating.

With all the bad press for Yahoo! lately I hate to say it, but I still like Yahoo! better. I have tried Gmail and can’t get used to it. Tech issues aside, I just don’t like it.

I have yet to find something I don’t like about gmail apps. So far I have it integrated with 4 different domains and all run very smoothly!

I’m thinking about moving from Gmail myself. I’m fed up with random errors and the growing number of domains who bounce back saying that google is listed for spamming.

And when is Gmail officially out of beta? C’mon - it’s been at least 4 years!

I’ve been having nothing but issues with Google Apps Gmail. I’m looking into getting off there and onto a friend’s colo box.

I’ve not only had unresponsiveness, but it appears that some mail systems are refusing to accept mail from Google App’s SMTP servers.

-Adam

I use with success Goggle Apps premium version since 6 months (I was an early adopter of the free gmail too).

However, I regret the lack of integration between Google Apps account and normal Gmail accounts.

I also regret the fact that I can’t use my Goggle Apps account in free service such as Google Groups. There is a workaround where you create a Gmail account with your Gooogle Apps email but honestly, for a paid version …

Sorry to hear that Gmail has not been kind to you — we must admit, we have had NO problems since acquiring the service as our email platform about 2 years ago!

If Gmail sucked once, then Outlook sucked a thousand times. I use Google Apps for the last three years, so far no problems. There are occasional hiccups but it is not a big deal. Google will soon fix the problems if any.

“Messages are either not getting sent or being lost by the system. Several people have complained about not receiving replies, even after we have sent them back.”

I guess I glad to hear that we’ve been experiencing the same thing. Am in the middle of trying to debug this. Very frustrating.

So here’s my questions - what does the $1200/month support buy you? Would Google Support analyze your mail flow and determine the bottleneck/root cause? Could you essentially sign up for their support for a couple months, have them determine and resolve the issue, and then drop back to the free edition?

Massive issues here too Om. Same kind of situation. The only issue we regularly see is Gmail crashing IE7 with an “Operation aborted” error (crossed multiple laptops, OS’s, etc).

I have 4 Google Apps mail accounts — along with my personal gmail account. For the past few weeks all the accounts (as well as others in our distributed workforce) have been the recipient of extremely slow response and “Oops…” errors. Sending large files is taking longer (the attach and upload), and it’s happening cross platform (PC/Mac).

OM,

I use GMail for sending mail for one of my domains. I recently discovered the 500 email-a-day limit, too. I hit this limit on a test email account which I know for a fact sent less then 100 emails total since I created it.

I uncovered some additional info that if you use the bcc field your account could could also be flagged in some sorts. Apparently, there’s another anti-spam feature if you address more then 50-recipients at a time, too.

To me, these are BS restrictions. Upgrading to the premium service just raises the 500 email limit to 2000. So, you could still pay all your hard earned cash and be left with the same, intermittent problem.

Hopefully, your post solicits some sort of response from Google. I think the service in general is really good. Although, I bet the volume of email I generate is slim-to-none compared to Team GigaOM.

I’ve been using Gmail for personal mail (and for some of my freelance work) since back in the day when you had to get a personal invite to sign up for an account, and I love it. I use the web mail when I’m traveling and download it into Outlook when I’m at home and aside from the occasional Outlook download delay, rarely see problems. And I agree with one user’s comment on here about the spam filter, it’s a rare occasion when any junk gets past the spam folder, and I run three separate Gmail accounts. All said, I imagine for a business there must be larger challenges than I face as a personal user, but I’d take Gmail over my former yahoo or hotmail accounts any day of the week.

We`re using G apps for your domain to run our blog and website.
So far, we haven`t had any troubles with Emails not being sent or anything like that.
The real issue for us is that the integration between the regular website management tools that google provides is very poorly done.
For example, I`d hoped it would be a lot easier to add google analytics for our website.
I guess Google doesn`t agree with me. It`s not even possible to create an account with our domain users.
Google Sites is one of the worst web builders I`ve ever used!
This was such a disappointment. It was the first time I`d used a google application and didn`t say “you little genius”
We were intending to write about this on our blog, and might still will.

The IMAP service periodically cuts out. Also, if you have users who rely on IMAP, they will find the inability to control spam filtering strength via regular mail clients frustrating.

GMail is a distributed platform underneath. So, the schizophrenic nature you experience is probably a couple of services in the cloud failing and the architecure compensating by establishing a consistent state for your mailbox eventually.

Or it could just be that you send 500+ messages a day from your inbox!

Cheers,

Zubin.

I have one gmail account that seems to go psycho once in a while — it will display over 900 unread messages when being displayed through Apple Mail. Once you select the account, the 900+ emails vanish. They are phantom messages. Bizarre.

Then all at once, it’ll go back to normal for two or three weeks before starting all over again. Nutty.

I think this is one of those rare cases where Yahoo got the interface right. I think it’s superior to gmail, it’s intuitive. I can’t speak about the back end, however.

There’s no reason why a user should have to care whether GMail is run on a “distributed platform” or a room full of bareshirted guys in chains walking in circles to power a giant bamboo camshaft.

It’s hard to diagnose what’s going on here from the comfort of an armchair, but I’ve noticed in the past few weeks that GMail seems to be increasingly capacity constrained — it’s running noticeably slower and much more spam is getting through (suggesting that they’re devoting resources to just keeping the system up instead of devoting it to filtering spam).

We switched to Gmail and apps a couple of weeks back and it’s been a bit flaky on IMAP, but not too horrible. The part that makes me dream of Outlook is the calendar. The calendar itself and its integration with mail is pretty awful. As someone else said on this thread, you get what you paid for. @ $50/user/year, I doubt if we can expect any more… :(

I am using G apps, for my company domain and all my person domain, I also have outsource exchange server with another business. I switched from Sendmail/Entrouage to Gmail/Mail.app a few months ago (I am using IMAP with the exchange account).

Gmail IMAP with Mac Mail.app suck. Especially when every email get download twice, I use the save mail in local computer option from some accounts so I can use mail.app to search. I know there are scripts and work around, but I rather take a nap and think about the future then spending time screwing around like that.

I also have the same sending problem like Om has once in a while in one of the domain, I think Om may be right with the probability of a scaling problem. However, IMAP with iphone works great, now if I can search email in iphone…..

I will say gmail has more down time then a pay exchange server, but I like the intergration with the other gapps. It’s far from perfect and I am kind of disappointed that the improvement has been coming very slowly.

I am also hoping Google to integrate all the information and communication components together with Grand Central, gtalk, gmail, greader, gnews….e.t.c. so I can jsut go to one place to see all the infomation and communication channel I want have, I am sure they may be working on something like that, but is it too much to ask for having that doen before end of this decade?

Jimmy

Garett Rogers recntly had an article “Google needs to rethink its customer service strategy” ( (link) )

Apparently it’s common knowledge that Google does not provide support;

>> Even the premium version which includes some technical support is useless when you have a non “How do I?” problem that requires real assistance.

It doesn’t stop at just Google Apps though — it’s impossible to get real customer service from Google for anything. You get lost in automated responses and forums that are filled with people having the same problems with no answers most of the time.
<<

Then again, isn’t that the promise of Saas?

OM,

I don’t get where you get your $1200/month from. I think you probably mean $1200/yr because the price is $50/usr/yr. I have been using gmail for years (and have been using the apps edition for over a year) and it has been absolutely fantastic.

Ross
- (link)

We have been using Gmail and its product suite for some time now and we actually have set up a number of our clients on it and it has been the best move for everyone. No complaints, everyone loves it and it has made their lives easier. Not sure how you have it set up, but you might want to look into the set up before you give up.

I have two email accounts, one for work and one for personal use, and both have been flawless. I’ve heard about issues with IMAP and obviously syncing is less than perfect, but I’m just using Gmail for basic webmail (and checking it with my phone now and then through google.com’s mobile site) and everything has been super. For a free email service I have been really happy with it and it’s gotten me away from tools like Thunderbird and handling my own mail through my server.

As for google offering service, I would not get my hopes up. I have emailed them once or twice and I have gotten helpful responses after a day or two, which surprised me. I generally use Google boards for help, it turns out that if I am having an issue so is someone else.

We use Google Apps and Gmail. Email always locks up whenever you have words like script, etc. (things that might be code) in your email. I have complained several times to Gmail but since their customer service is lousy and they have no direct link within Gmail it is difficult for me to tell if they have even received my message. I have taken to spelling words like script as so…sc ri pt. Terrible!

Doug K.

A buddy was interviewing w/Google about a month ago, in the Google exec’s office. The interviewer excused himself repeatedly to check email, explaining that it had been down all morning and he was waiting for a critical item….

Gmail (both in Google Apps and the regular public version) have both taken a serious nosedive in terms of reliability and stability in recent months. My advice is to not bother paying for the Premium version; we do, and Google’s support is still both practically non-existent, and when you do get someone it’s invariably too late to be of any good.

I love the interface, but if they can’t make it stable it isn’t worth it.

I commend you for speaking up your mind.

I do have problems with receiving emails. I’ll send them to an address that forwards directly to my gmail account and never get them.

The other reason I dislike e-mail is hearing my wife complain about it :)

Try GMX.com for email.

I agree, I also have seen a lot of issues with Gmail.
1. You send out a email, the recepient never gets it!!
2. Try to send a large attachment and the mail does not go through!!
3. The conversational format gets very irritating when it combines two separate conversation into one with similar attributes (like from Tom J and Tom K etc)
…

I have 20 employees on Google Apps for your domain for 18 months. For most of us it works fine even with heavy use, but a handful of employees on Macbooks have continual issues, to the point where I am thinking of ditching it. The issues are similar to what Om describes - random outages, delayed mail and random login rejections.

I’ve been using Google Apps on my domain almost since it came out, and I’ve loved it - very few problems with Gmail, and I already liked the Gmail interface.

One quick question on people not getting e-mails you send - do you have a good SPF record setup for your domain? (I don’t see one for gigaom.com…) I found that helped prevent my domain from getting spam-blocked, since the mail servers for my domain are not on my domain. Google’s recommendation is here: (link)

Om, I can’t agree with you more with this article!

The Gmail service is not reliable, the interface is cumbersome, and because of the drastic change in folder structure and UI, many of my users didn’t know if they replied or when it was sent, etc…

If it wasn’t for the hardship of keeping an Exchange Server up-and-running, nothing can come close to Exchange look-a-like apps such as:

- Exchange/Outlook
- Zimbra
- Scalix

Hosted Exchange is still expensive and not very flexible in customization.

Good article

We have the same issues you’re reporting.

The service was working just fine until two weeks or so ago. Now the problems don’t stop.

Sounds like a mactard problem.

Nero problems here with vanilla Gmail or mail through Google Apps.

I’ve been using GMail Apps for at least a year or more. Haven’t really had any issues until the last couple of weeks. At that point there seemed to be numerous short length outages for a period of a couple weeks (stopped in the last few days). I use it both through Outlook (via POP/SMTP) and directly through the web. When Outlook had issues the web also had issues.

It seemed to me this coincided with the release of Google Labs but has since cleared up.

Yes, same issues. The constant IMAP issues with the 993 errors and 502 errors. Several times a day. Drives me nuts.

Om:

I use Gmail in a lot of different instances. I have two personal Gmail accounts run strictly through Gmail that I access via the Web. I’ve never had problems with those.

I have two other accounts set up through GAFYD that I use with my blogs. Both of these work wonderfully with my iPhone using IMAP. However, of the two, one of them has similar issues to what you described. I often find my emails disappear/are not delivered. I recently switched to accessing these accounts through my Mac’s Mail application using IMAP. It works, yet it doesn’t. It’s integrated very poorly. I have to delete everything at least twice, for instance, and several of my emails are still disappearing.

I wouldn’t recommend using GAFYD for business. For my personal blogs, well, as someone above said - you get what you pay for.

Cheers!

Sporadic time-out issues via IMAP. Slightly frustrating, but not worth jumping ship — yet. Thanks for bringing attention to this.

I’ve had a number of problems with gmail: the most common is that I’ve been locked out of my account. Usually it’ll happen for a stretch of 2-5 days, where I’ll be locked out for 1/2 blocks approx 4 times a day. Then everything will work.

I’ve had even bigger problems with the calendar — lost appointments, reversion to previous edits, duplicate appointments and even appointments moving times. Again, these errors tend to occur in concentrated blocks of 2-5 days.

We haven’t moved to Google Apps at work — perhaps these issues would be resolved if we didn’t rely on the free version. However, it’s hard to inspire confidence with so many issues.

I spearheaded a switch of our 150 person company from Exchange to Google Apps. I also have Google Apps for my personal domain. For our company we went with the premium, supported, version.

In a nutshell it was a nightmare. Far too many shortcomings, support is no where near what a real business needs, and migration tools weren’t all there yet. In addition we had a lot of trouble inviting Outlook users to meetings even though it was supposed to work.

So we dumped it and went back to Exchange. I have had no issues with my personal domain however.

Om,

Been running into this more and more often, thanks for bringing attention to it. On the whole, hard to complain too much about the cost, storage, spam, and webmail client — whether you pay or use the free version, you get a lot.

Using your probability of being a big player, I put google apps well north of 50% in the SMB space, and probably about 40% in the enterprise market.

FWIW, some issues are client specific, like getting prompted for your password again and again in Thunderbird:

(link)

We’ve been using Google Apps for our domain here at kwiry for over a year now and have had no real problems, in fact we all use either IMAP or POP with a blackberry and I use the web interface exclusively and other than an occasional web slowdown/glitch, it’s been fantastic, I recommend it all the time. I do wonder if Firefox 3 or recent server load issues may be causing some of your problems Om.

I’ve been using Google Apps for about 4 months now. I switched because of the provider I was using at the time switched their platform and I lost a really nice feature. youraddress+anythingelseyoucanthinkof@domain.com

I don’t care for the Gmail interface. I use the IMAP, which is alright. It freaks out at least once a day, and Mozilla Thunderbird will make me re-enter my password. But this eventually happened with my other IMAP provider too.

I also found something interesting as I thought I was losing messages also.
If you have a regular gmail account, and the email address you use for Google Apps happens to be linked to your gmail account, then all mail sent ends up in the regular Gmail sent items folder. I don’t know how to solve this, and have tried removing the associations in my account preferences too.

We have ALL the same problems. It’s very ungoogly to have all the problems we have. They have finally exposed themselves to serious performance issues. They are NOT ready for serious business users.

For me, I’m not missing a bunch of email, but I’ve noticed that Postini and the spam filter have caught a lot more real mail and flagged it than it used to, so I’ve had to check it from time to time.

I have to echo what others have already posted, and agree that I do not like how poorly those of us with our own domains duct taped into google’s apps are treated. Every time a new feature comes out we have to wait for it. Many of my google services use a separate google account because they don’t understand my domain-based ID. When they *do* come along my settings are never migrated to my domain account, and I have to copy them over.

I even paid for the premium treatment (to get postini, primarily, but in hopes of getting better support and integration) and it’s made it more painful, not less. To this day my google apps domain stuff doesn’t integrate with analytics, adsense, reader, health, etc. etc. etc. I just love maintaining THREE google IDs.

We use Google Apps (the Premier Edition) at SnapStream and it works great for us. No deliverability problems. We have a 30 account system. We were happy to replace our Exchange server with Google Apps.

Another company that I advise has 200 people on Google Apps and they are using the free version and it’s run pretty well for them also, though not as well as it works for us — whether that’s because they have more users (200 vs. our 30) or because they are using the free version (vs. our using the pay version), I don’t know. Certain things seem to, annoyingly, fail in the free version like e-mail address auto-complete within your domain. There also seems to be some sort of a barrier of 200 users past which things start breaking in the free version (and, for all I know, the pay version).

Oh and I’ll echo what other people here have said: the support DOES kind of suck.

What we expected was that we’d be able to pick-up the phone and get someone to help us with our problems, with the Premier Edition. After all, they did advertise phone support. What we got, in the end, was a process by which we could talk to someone on the phone if and only if there was some sort of severe outage scenario. I was disappointed in this.

I use gmail sparingly and I’ve found performance to be lacking. It hangs quite often, messages are sent slowly, navigation hangs, etc. But then again, the only reason I’m typing this is that I have some free time because the game I’m playing on my PS3 just froze and as I was typing this message Windows Vista froze as well. So, my experience with software these days is that all of it pretty much sucks. Somebody has to say it.

I’m getting pretty close to just unplugging from technology and going back to living a sane, simple tech-free life.

Om,
I don’t know if you see the irony. You guys picked a metered service for some illusive advantages (see your other posts about metered services).
Sorry couldn’t help it.

We’ve had 5 users on the premier service since April and haven’t had any trouble at all.

We use Google Apps and Gmail works great. For former Outlook users, the biggest difference is fast search. I prefer Mac Mail.app interface to Gmail. But set up your filters and labels in Gmail. I’ve received 10,000 emails in my first month on the job and it’s manageable. And I can search All Mail in a fraction of a second.

You would have to pry GMail from my cold dead hand. We are using Apps version for a small dev shop. The Web UI works great. I even have my iPhone set up to receive both my personal and work GMail accounts.

Let me guess, you still want to keep a local copy of your email on your laptop or “smart phone.” How very Web 1.0 old school of you ;-}

We’ve been using G Apps with a five user account for about 6 months and haven’t had any problems. (Mixed use of IMAP via Thunderbird and the web interface.)

We’re looking at getting Blackberries - can anyone who has had success with configuring push for Blackberries point me to a good configuration guide?

Overall my experiences with Google Apps (email) has been largely positive. But Google Apps mail might not be right for everyone. The Gmail interface in general is pretty nerdy. As you say if IMAP support is bad, then it is likely to drive the non-nerdy users nuts.

I had written about my experiences with Google Apps a while back.

(link)

Been using Gmail was great ease for several years, but in the last few months it hangs, fails to load, or does something strange several times / week.

I was initially very excited about GAFYD, but have basically parked my domain for now. It definitely has a lot of problems to work out. I think that the free, not-your-domain version is actually superior and less problematic. Lately I have noticed very long page load times in Gmail, but I am not sure if it is a Google problem or a Firefox 3 problem.

we are in the same boat with you Om - I dont understand it - half the time it wont send the email, then it gets lost, then it goes down, then the chat service logs me out and wont let me log back in…. they really need to hear this and do something about it

Om

Maybe you should give Exchange Online, the latest Online offering from Microsoft, a shot (link)

It’s built for businesses and enterprises in mind, unlike Google Apps which is really not industrial strength.

Srini

Hey Om, I have been running the premier version of Google Apps for the last year and don’t have any problems to report of. In addition to the support (assuming you are also talking about the same $50/year/account plan), you get more control with Postini, if that’s your type of thing.

There are a lot of small annoyances, but overall Id say we are happy. Been using it for just under 2 years.

I was surprised by the limit on emails per day. You get 500, but thats through the web interface. If you use any mail client it allows only a 100. Thats way too few.

Like a lot of others IMAP was a nightmare, and I just started using the browser on a PC, and the client apps for the cell phone. This also eliminated another annoyance. When you send a mail using the browser, the mail downloads in the client and in the inbox, not sent items.

Another issue is with signature placement, which has recently been fixed with the google labs release, not that its available on GAFYD accounts yet.

The prblems arent huge, Ive dealt with worse. But they are dissapointing.

Google customer service is an oxymoron.

Complaining about Gmail! you must see how they treat their Adwords customers who routinely drop anywhere from 1k to xxk per month.

For months you could be going steady with 50 cents a click and then suddenly they slap you with 5-8 dollars per click! You have not much idea why, and not much of a recourse either.

We were dropping $ 2-4 K per month on adwords without knowing there was a way to contact any kind of customer support. Finally we found out about a telephone number mentioned in a “forum”, mind you not on Google web site, but rather an independent forum.

When you call them, they are nice (they cant do much to your account anyways). But overall, the company does not want to interact with you beyond what you can interact with them via “their interfaces” on the web.

Some day, this will come to bite them in the behind. Our company would certainly take adwords account to the very next competitive search engine that would value “Customer support score” as much as Google want their customers to take care of their adwords “Quality Score”.

Gmail (and google apps) rocks!

In the last few days Gmail itself has been constipated, refusing to send email. This is a departure from the norm. No Google Apps, just plain old gmail.

We are having quite a few issues with Google Apps Mail including lost messages in both direction. The latest one was this morning. I’ve been horrified at the idea that this could be gmail’s fault. All that space is useless if I can’t be sure that my stuff is getting in there or reaching destination.

The email infrastructure is quite reliable by design (and implementation). If a message doesn’t disappear, if it does not reach someone for some reason it will come back with errors. Evaporating messages seems to be a new feature.

Since about a year, I have many domains running mail via google’s gmail, and have had no issues whatsoever. I find it to be one of the greatest web-services I have ever used and wouldn’t go back even if you paid me.

I’m sorry about your problems, but maybe they’re isolated to the volumes of email you’re sending per day (maybe google has put some limitations on it to prevent abuse or spamming), but I’m recommending it to everyone I know who’s hosting his own email-server.

Great for startups btw, unless of course you’re paranoid and you don’t want your email to travel through the UK/US, because then it gets read by ECHELON

I have hundreds of users over two domains using gmail, google docs and salesforce.com

Compared to most other software, we get very little support issues with gmail. (I am looking at our support tickets: salesforce.com gets 10 times as many complaints as gmail and these are our two applications with lowest number of tickets. even our wifi, printer and projector cause many more support tickets !!) On top of that, the cost per user compared to exchange is so low as you do not need expensive sys admins and large server farms.

I think gmail is a great boon for any company and reduces support call by a lot. Now, if they just provide us with a printer, projector and wifi that works without managing anything…

No real issues using the Free Google Apps for Domain here. Managing a few unique domains with usage of 20-40 accounts per domain. I have to admit though that primary usage is through the Web UI.

I had to choose between Zimbra, Exchange and Gmail when I started my company and chose Zimbra hosted by 01.com. The interface rocks and while I have not had any problems with Gmail on my personal account, I think Zimbra is a better option for businesses (especially SMBs) I am concerned though that with the acquisition of Zimbra by Yahoo what their future is going to be. Perhaps Zimbra management should buy it back. They may yet have a better chance of succeeding as an independent company than getting lost in the Yahoo debacle.

I have not yet downloaded the Zimbra desktop app yet but plan to do so soon.

My wife and I run Google Apps for our personal domains and are seeing the same things a lot of others here are. Mails not being sent or received and no bounces.

It is really getting scary.

Zimbra is certainly a nice, more business-like product… but being frustrated by gmail’s reliability? I think you’re dreaming.
My help-desk spider-sense tells me if emails are getting lost, it’s user-error, not gmail’s servers.
Are there occasional slow-performance-periods, and password validation annoyances? sure.
Have you ever had an email provider that didn’t have occasional glitches? That measurably outperformed google’s reliability? And what did it cost? I’d rather have it run slow than actually go down… and google has been exceptional in that regard.

I have no problems with Gmail, I have a problem with Gmail’s IMAP, though. It’s sometimes slower than loading messages on Gmail - and that’s not a good thing. Also, I would like Gmail to automatically mark messages as SPAM when I move them to the [Gmail]/Spam-folder. They don’t do that now, but it would be great.

Still using Outlook at Jupitermedia — that works! — but my home e-mail is Gmail, and I have experienced the hang ups you talk about (but not the lost messages).

Are you using any other Google Apps? Getting strange results from analytics?

Kind of a love hate relationship.

I am actually glad to find that I am not the only one.

A head hunter who flew up to PA from Tennessee to meet with me called just the other day to say that an e-mail I sent her back when she first contacted me had just arrived.

Imagine if I did not follow up the e-mail with a phone call. And I didn’t know this was a problem.
I had other issues that I did not like.

Thanks for letting me know I am not alone.

Google hosts my domain mail, and I have a regular account. So far, I’ve had no problems at all with the web client or IMAP to my mail.app client, or iPhone using either account.

Re: Gmail vs Exchange

I was an Exchange admin for several years, and I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone.

@Om: Sorry for the delayed reply. On the GAFYD I’m only using a couple of email addresses and don’t have heavy volume so I likely wouldn’t hit the kind of scalability issues that you are.

The 500 message limit is interesting though. Seems like that’s something they should be listing prior to someone signing up and making a major switch like this.

Like Rane, our company chose (link) , too, for Zimbra, over Exchange and Google Apps. While I am a Gmail user, and was hoping to use Google Apps, we’ve been pleased with the performance and features of their Zimbra hosting systems. I had them undelete mail for me from almost a month ago, and without a problem I was able to retrieve an attachment. ALthough I typically use Outlook, on the web with Firefox 3, the login time is down to less than a second.

I have ben using free Google Apps for my domain and I have configured the same (and premiere) for my other Clients, no one has complained so far about any issues. Everybody is just so happy with the service. In fact many of them like the web-interface so much that they have stopped using the Outlook completely and moved to browser client.
Go Google Go!!!

Hey Om .. looks like you are having problems due to the number / volume of traffic in your mail box .. I use gmail for a lot of domains .. and dont have any issues for the past 1 year

500 emails a day? You have to be kidding.

I’ve been using it as a personal email for 4 years. I think that UI 2 is WAY to slow compared to UI one, even though it’s added features are nice. Other than that no serious complaints, just a few missing features. But switch to exchange? no way… better to set up a postfix system and round cube… +openldap if you need it.

Om, Are you using Firefox 3?

I had lots of issues using gmail with Firefox 3, and when I switched to Safari and did the same, everything went smooth. There may be a bug on Firefox 3 Javascript engine…

-Aydin

I have had one or two blog posts up about “mail sending denied” by Gmail, for what I think is over a year now, and watch the search engine statistics.

The last week or two, I have had a lot more regular traffic for people googling and finding that post. So, I think they have probably done or are doing something recently that is causing more problems for people.

When I had big gmail trouble, it was when they were adding new servers or upgrading accounts I believe.

One thing about google that isn’t a gmail thing, though, is that it is very browser intense if you use it’s website tools, so think twice before using them if you want pages to load quickly for your businesses.