I need some data regarding Gmail reliability and since I need as much as I can get my hands on in 8 hours I'll keep it short and sweet
1. how many times a day do you check your gmail?
2. how many emails a day do you receive through gmail?
3. how many do you send?
4. If you could give a percentage of "uptime" for the mail service what would it be?
5. describe any outtages (or outtage patterns) you expereince with gmail
6. Do you use web based mail or their POP3 service (or both)
If I could get as many of you gmail users to answer those as truthfully and quickly as you can I'd be very appreciative! Any other stories, loves, hates, concerns you'd want to pass along are most welcome as well.
1. ~144 times/day (a plugin for Samurize runs every 10 min)
2. 3-4/day
3. Maybe 1/week unless something comes up.
4. 99%, only seen it down once during some maintenance.
5. none
6. Both, POP3 only when I read them on my mobile.
Other:
A great service! Never had any problems with it myself. Only issues I know of are that my mom can't send attachments and she has problems with POP3 and Outlook Express.
I love their label system and the way they keep conversations together.
Would be nice to be able to select a few mails and choose "merge/split" conversations though.
Can't think of much else now, but I'm sure it will pop up something the second I press Submit just beacuse I said so...
:
1. Countless times... I keep it open in a tab most of the time, and also have the instant notifier (gtalk) running quite a lot
2. Would that be in- or excluding spam? spam - about 75/day (and growing..); stuff I keep - maybe 10-20 on avg.
3. ~3
4. 98+
5. No patterns really... when it happens, it's either the "500 server error" or a "sorry, please try again later" page. Though last week, connections just timed out for a while and the server was not reachable at all. Doesn't happen more than once a month though, rather less
6. Web based, if pop then only for the rare backup
1. My mail application checks for new mail every five minutes.
2. 20-40
3. Ususally 0. (The mails I recieve are mostly from discussion lists I follow).
4. > 99 %
5. "Service not available" messages, but very rarely.
6. POP3, rarely web based.
From: The Land of one Headlight on. Insane since: May 2001
posted 05-02-2006 17:36
1. Weekly
2. Daily none. Weekly 1 or 2. Lots of spam but it gets moved to trash automatically.
3. One weekly (maybe)
4. 100% <lol>
5. None
6. Whatever it is when you go to the gmail page.
Not a typical user I'm sure... maybe if I had more friends..... =)
1. Opera checks my account every 5 minutes or so, but I open it only a few times a day
2. excluding spam, 2-3 on average
3. usually 1 or 2
4. 99%... I haven't been able to access my account only once in 10 months, and it didn't last long
5. none
6. both... I use the pop3 service to backup everything on my hard drive
My opinion... It's free, the storage is huge (2.7gb currently), some features are really useful, it is (almost) ad free, and reliable... Definitely the best web-based email service I had the occasion to use.
1) I go to the page often, but use gnotify to alert me of new messages.
2) I receive between 5-20 emails a day, maybe more counting all the spam...
3) send maybe 2-3 per day
4) I've never personally experienced any down time.
5) (see above)
6) I use the web mail. I have always hated webmail, generally speaking. I love gmail. I still use my regular pop3 email app for other addresses, but gmail is my main email and app.
I honestly couldn't be happier with an email service...
1. My Gmail gets forwarded to Treomail so I get notifications immediately on my Treo. So I never really check it, I just get the emails as they come in.
2. ~50
3. ~ 30 - 40
4. > 99%
5. Once in a while there are very brief outages. I've never experienced one longer than 5 minutes and that was the most extreme ever.
can't thank you guys enough for helpin out here! This will be a great reference, be good to track relaiability of the service through the coming months/years, please continue bu I'm done for now!
I'm trying to guage wether or not it's a good idea use gmail instead o domained mail, and just use forwarding to the gmail instead. Seems worth a try anyhoo...
Our old web guy started working as an executive director for a missions organization, he uses email very heavily, and recently (maybe a few months ago) switched it all over to gmail. He couldent be happier. I think he uses mozilla and the uploader deal to store stuff online, and he uses the google desktop as well. He has room to spare for his bazillion emails, and he has never told me of any problems with it.
From: 2 steps away from a los angeles curb Insane since: Nov 2003
posted 05-03-2006 12:47
1. errr, each account about every 5 minutes
2. 17-25 not including the gazillion spams on several of them... although a couple are completely spam free for almost a year or two... uhm... when was this... hold on.
9-13-2004 minus 5-3-2006... so, 3 months there, 5 months here... plus 12.
Year and a half?
3. heh, is 15 too much? but in all fairness that's using 11 different identities. So, uhm... 1 and a half?
Yeah, 1 and a half!
4. 99%
5. A little glitchy on an occasional send, sometimes it doesn't poll properly. But a second try usually fixes it.
6. Web based for spam checks... sometimes I like looking through all my spam, it makes me feel popular.
My only concern is the recent orders to divulge info to the feds... hmmm, maybe I shouldnta aughta signed up for all that perverse, kinky, web based.... Hey! Wait a minute! What's this info for!?
Crap! Now all my dirty little secrets are gonna be floating through the net, being fondled by google bots and spiders!
Ahhh! Spiders!
I hate... oh, nevermind. I forgot... I like spiders.
From: East Anglia, England. Insane since: Sep 2003
posted 05-03-2006 15:07
1. Many times, have Firefox widget that checks every 10mins.
2. average about 10, depends how busy some mailing lists get.
3. 1 or 2 maybe.
4. 90% ish.
5. ocasionally gmail doesn't respond, but it's rare.
6. only web based.
mas - PaulBM - you're both reporting 90% and that has me greatly concerned, those 2 90s would have been a whole different data set for certain yesterday
according to your useage reports, specifically checking mail, 90% would have me to believe that you experience DAILY downtime?! How long in duratation would you say each downtime is?
Hey J, for about 5 years I used my own domain for my email simply because I wasn't interested at all in web based email. However, I finally got sick of downtime associated with my domain's email (Hostrocket was really good about email at first but about 6 months ago it seemed it started to go down daily.)
I switched to Gmail and absolutely love it because you can POP into it if you want or just check it on the web.
I took the data from yesterday that was all 98+ satisfaction/uptime and sold the gmail over webhosting for mail idea to about 30 users so I certainly hope it works I'm not too worried, it's a church and there's not a power user with mission critical email among them so it'll be a great test case.
I've been using it myself from almost day one, well, I had an account anyhow, but I've made the move in the last few months or so to moving domained mail over to it and I've had no problems with it either so I'm optimistic.
If I'm not mistaken they're piloting a program where you can set you mx records to them and use them for flat out mail server full on. If anyone's in that program or can confirm it's exisitence I'd love to hear about it.
I believe that Google is the next big computing platform (if not that then a damn-fine-for-free Exchange server solution for now). The saying's been around for a loooong time that "the network is the computer"... I think that's where we're headed, again, dumb terminals (our desktops) accessing apps and files on the network (web). Like banks now hold our money and we don't think twice about it, our data will come out from under our mattresses and buried Mason jars (PCs) and into the datacenter.
I look forward to the possiblity of an ensuing debate that goes something along the lines of "I'd never trust my data to so and so business over my local" but I sincerely believe that my son will accept it like I accept the bank being the correct place to put my money.