I’ve noticed that it sometimes takes a while for Gmail to send or receive e-mails; it’s not uncommon that I get something in my inbox that was timestamped several hours before, and once a whole batch of messages from a listserv took almost a day to arrive. This makes me a little trepidous about the possibility that e-mails, from time to time, might actually get lost and never arrive at all. I use Gmail (or my erstwhile law school account, which forwards to Gmail) as my primary e-mail address on my resume when applying for jobs or seeking publication of articles, and I hate to think that I might not hear from an employer or a journal that has tried to contact me. Plus, I know that Gmail is still at least ostensibly in beta stage, meaning that it’s reasonable to expect that not all of the bugs have yet been worked out.
So I guess I wanted to ask whether anyone has definitively had their Gmail account fail to deliver an e-mail that you’ve sent or that’s been sent to you, without providing the appropriate mailer-daemon notification. Is this an irrational fear of mine, or not?
I’ve had that problem from some specific servers. Hotmail appears to hate gmail’s guts for some reason :rolleyes: The other cases where I’ve had problems were from servers that are setup Og-knows-how and which also have problems sending to yahoo (we checked).
So far, only 3 servers have given me that kind of trouble.
I have also had instances where email that I’ve subscribed to but cleaned out massively after coming from vacation got flagged as spam for a few days. Once I’d informed gmail that no, it wasn’t spam, it started going into my inbox again.
I’ve had letters that took one or two days to reach me (mail from me to their sender went through in minutes, though). Afaik, no lost letters. Definitely never missed anything I was expecting.
Well, I’m sure this is a good thing… but I had a friend write a quick program for me and send it as an attachment from Outlook. After a couple minutes it bounced back to him as Gmail doesn’t accept .exe files as attachments. After renaming the file as an MP3 and then unnaming it upon receipt, it worked fine.
Well, I suppose you can use it as a primary. I guess I should say don’t put a lot of stock into it as an important email address, as Gmail is still in beta testing. If you wanna use if for friends or dumping ground for storage, fine. But I wouldn’t use it as a business contact.
Because it’s still in beta testing? Anything other than or more specific than that? I’m curious, too, cause I’ve been using it for months and haven’t had any problems. It’s perfect for my work because I work partially at home, partially at an office so being web-based is good and I often get large file attachments, which gmail can handle.
Twice I’ve tried to send something to my Gmail account from my office e-mail, and it didn’t go through. The oddest part is that I didn’t get a failure notice at work about it.
That’s the only thing that’s ever gone wrong with it, though.
Well, I don’t have any specifics. But isn’t beta testing enough? It’s the same reason that I wouldn’t run Windows XP 64-bit edition (available, but still under development) as a primary OS. While functional, and most things will likely work, there’s always the possibility of it being unstable. Why risk using gmail on something like a resume when it’s more likely for it to get lost, then say Yahoo!?
I myself haven’t had any issues with gmail and use it for all kinds of stuff. Although the risk is small, I understand that I can have something delayed or lost at anytime. But others have had issues, as shown in this thread. I use another account as a primary. So if anything goes wrong, they can’t blaim it on beta testing!
