GMail Failures

Don’t get me wrong… GMail is great and all (especially considering its price), but it does have its problems and its shortcomings.  Here’s one problem I ran into last night while setting up Thunderbird 5.0 (a popular, free, Windows E-Mail program (Available for Linux and Mac too)).

What are the problems?

First Problem:  One message had errors:

I know this is a GMail problem for the following reasons:

  1. Other people have reported this that aren’t using Thunderbird.
  2. The E-Mail message in question could not even be loaded using just the GMail interface in the browser.

While downloading my E-Mail into my Thunderbird 5.0 for Windows client app via POP3, Thunderbird received this error from the GMail server:

The RETR command did not succeed. Error retrieving a message. Mail server pop.gmail.com responded: Unable to retrieve rfc822msgid:

The RETR command did not succeed. Error retrieving a message. Mail server pop.gmail.com responded: Unable to retrieve rfc822msgid:

Then refused to try downloading anymore E-Mail messages.  The fact that it refused to move beyond this error is Thunderbird’s fault (I think), but the error itself is GMail’s fault.

To check on whether or not this error was Thunderbird’s or GMail’s fault, I loaded up GMail in my browser and did a search on the msgid listed in the error (that was the only identifying piece of information Thunderbird gave me and this is information that’s normally hidden in the header).  Luckily, GMail’s search found it while I was using the browser UI (which means that GMail does look in the details of the message headers during a search… This is good!).  When it found the message, it listed it in the search results.  When I clicked on it, it showed me this:

image

I clicked on “Show Detailed Technical Info” and it revealed one more line of text, “Numeric Code: 54”:

image

Temporary Error (500)

We’re sorry, but your Gmail account is temporarily unavailable. We apologize for the inconvenience and suggest trying again in a few minutes.
If the issue persists, please visit the
Gmail Help Center »

Try Again Sign Out

Hide Detailed Technical Info

Numeric Code: 54

©2008 Google – Gmail Home – Privacy PolicyProgram PoliciesTerms of UseGoogle Home

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I don’t know if it matters, but the message had an embedded image in it.  After about 5 or 10 minutes, the error went away and both the GMail web interface and more importantly, Thunderbird were able to process this message without any errors.  I was on the verge of deleting this message from within the GMail interface to allow Thunderbird to continue downloading.

Second Problem:  GMail only allows you to download each message twice via POP3.

I’ve been using Thunderbird for years.  In October 2010, I had a hard drive failure and when I installed a new drive and Windows, I didn’t install Thunderbird right away because I wanted my old e-mail in my new Thunderbird installation.  With a normal POP3 provider, I’d just Install Thunderbird and set up my account and download all my e-mail.  Unfortunately, since GMail puts limitations on how many times you can download a message via POP3, that wasn’t an option because some of the older messages had already been downloaded twice.  That means I‘d have to recover my Thunderbird profiles folder(s) from my old drive, which was preferable anyway, because I already had 4 e-mail accounts configured and nearly 120 message filters set up.  My old drive was very flaky.  It wasn’t until yesterday that I was able to get it running long enough to recover my e-mail from it.  Oh, and did I mention that it was backed up to Carbonite, but Carbonite DELETED 100% OF MY BACKUP DATA!?!?!?

Third Problem:  GMail reports a seemingly random number back to Thunderbird as to how many new messages there are.

I subscribe to several programming mailing lists and newsletters, so I get a LOT of e-mail.  Between October 2010 and now, we’re talking tens of thousands.  I also do a LOT of personal e-mailing too, so we’re talking thousands there too.  I’m not going to get into an argument about when e-mail should or shouldn’t be deleted here though, but I don’t delete anything, considering how cheap storage is, among plenty of other reasons.  (Note, that I get virtually zero spam.)

Last night when I hit the “Get Mail” button, it was reporting that only around 500 new messages were there and would proceed to download those messages.

 image

As soon as it was done, I’d hit the “Get Mail” button again, and it’d report a random number (close to what it reported before… sometimes a little higher, sometimes a little lower) and proceed to download those messages.  I continued this for hours.  The trend in the random number was going down over time.  It got down to around 60 or so before I gave up and went to bed.

Now, this morning, it’s only downloading SIX messages at a time

image

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and we’re only up to getting messages from early June (Today is July 10th).  I don’t know exactly how many there are, but there are orders of magnitude beyond six!  At this rate, I’ll NEVER get everything downloaded.  Closing and reopening Thunderbird doesn’t work.  This is a GMAIL problem.

Fourth Problem: You can’t do a POP3 download of your messages more than twice.

You’d think, “Well, why would you ever need to download it more than ONCE anyway?”.  For these reasons:

  1. Over time, you’re going to have more than one hard drive failure.  If you don’t have a backup, or your backup service provider (like Carbonite) screws you like there’s no tomorrow, you’re going to need to re-download your messages.
  2. You have several computers you use (home PC, notebook, work PC, maybe a 2nd home PC) that you’d like to use a client side E-Mail program on to access your E-Mail.

So, those are the major ones poking me in the eye right now.  I’m not recommending that you NOT use GMail.  It’s a GREAT service and provides some awesome features not available from other, free, E-Mail providers and if you use it right, you can virtually eliminate spam.  I’m not talking about Google’s SPAM filters either (which present a new problem I haven’t covered here).  Believe me when I say this:  In the past year, I’ve received fewer that TEN spam messages!  No, I’m not talking about 10 that slipped through GMail’s spam filter… I’m talking 10 TOTAL, whether or not GMail’s spam filter caught them (and, it did, BTW).

To take advantage of this ability to virtually eliminate spam using GMail, read this series of articles I wrote explaining how to do it.  It does take some change of your E-Mail practices, but it totally works!

  1. How to Stop SPAM: Basic Tips

  2. How to Stop SPAM: Advanced Tips

  3. How to Stop SPAM: Expert Tips

WARNINGS!!!

Things you should NOT do in response to this suggestion from Google:

http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/gmail/thread?tid=07ccf2c21b96f9b2&hl;=en

  1. Disable POP3 via the GMail interface, then turn it back on.

    • Why not?  Because this will reset GMail’s counter of the last message you downloaded.  Next time you download, you’ll start all over again, and you’ll have TWO OF EVERYTHING, and will NOT get any further ahead, and in fact, will be even FURTHER BEHIND THAN WHEN YOU STARTED!  I made the mistake of doing this, so trust me when I tell you, THIS IS NOT DESIRABLE!

  2. Set your client to delete messages on the server.

    • Why not?  Well, if you’re OK with losing them on the server, then go right ahead.  This means you’ll no longer be able to search them with GMail’s web interface nor see them from that interface.  The only copy of them will be on your local hard drive.
    • There’s theoretically a server setting to keep messages on the server, even after a delete request from a POP3 client, but I couldn’t find it in the settings.  The closest thing I found was on forwarding messages to keep the old ones, but nothing about keeping messages even after a delete command is issued.

  3. Set GMail’s POP3 to only download NEW messages posted AFTER you activate the setting.

    • Why not?  Because you’ll never get the message that were posted before then, but after the most recent one you’ve successfully downloaded.  You’ll have a large time gap on your local messages.

[Update 2011-07-12]

A couple days ago I followed one of the suggestions in the Google recommendations above under my warning… I changed the setting to download only items new after the change, then changed it back, and it reset my counter and when Thunderbird requested new mail, GMail started sending mail starting way back from 2008.  I figured, fine, I’ll let it run for a few days and I’ll delete the duplicates.

NO LUCK!  As of last night, GMail has been reporting “NO NEW MAIL!” and Thunderbird’s latest downloaded e-mail message it retrieved last night before GMail stopped sending was 8/9/2010!  That means, there’s no NO WAY for me to download any e-mail between then and now.

I have one last option.  Reset the counter on GMail to start downloading all again, and in Thunderbird, tell it to NOT keep messages on the server, while telling GMail, ignore that command.  Theoretically, this will let Thunderbird download via POP3, send delete command to GMail, which should NOT delete them, but will reset the counter of the last downloaded message.  I’ve already got it going and so far the first message I tested was successfully downloaded and NOT deleted from my GMail account.

Of course, now I’m getting a THIRD copy of everything going back to 2008.

Now, in about a week, I should have all my E-Mail downloaded locally.  Jeesh!  What a pain!

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