Death of Gmail

by Suw on June 22, 2006

Gmail, for the last month or two, has started running like a one-legged dog. It no longer runs – it staggers. Sometimes, if I'm lucky, it crawls. There appears to be a permanently unresponsive script running which kills it, no matter which browser I use.
Anyone suffering this? A friend of mine suggested that the problem could be GoogleTalk. I'd be perfectly happy to turn GoogleTalk off… if only I could find out how. Can't see a thing in my settings that could be mistaken for an 'off' button.
UPDATE: Anu tells me in the comments that it's at the bottom of the page 'standard without chat'. Dunno why they couldn't have that in the 'settings' tab too, which is the most logical place to look! I now have Gmail running without my chat enabled and will see if that solves the problem.
It is, though, really slowing me down. Not to mention driving me up the wall. Even typing an email is now a real pain in the ass, as the browser just becomes completely unresponsive.
It's as bad as Outlook.
Grr.
Oh, and first person to say 'Serves you right for using Gmail' gets a kick in the shins.

Anonymous June 22, 2006 at 2:21 pm

Suw,
Scroll all the way to the bottom and you'll see a link saying “standard without chat” – try that.
anu

Anonymous June 22, 2006 at 3:04 pm

Thank you!! I looked through all the settings, but never spotted that thing at the bottom. What a stupid place to put it!

Anonymous June 22, 2006 at 3:27 pm

Why not pick up your gmail over POP with something like apple mail, Suw?
I only use the gMail web interface when i'm away from my computer, Mail is IMHO vastly superior given the choice.

Anonymous June 22, 2006 at 6:03 pm

I have to admit, I really don't like Mail. The one thing that Gmail has over all other email clients and services is that is has what they don't – labels. I hate having to file things in one place – my brain is just not that organised. If Mail did labels, I'd use it.

Anonymous June 23, 2006 at 12:10 am

Wow, I'd never seen that either – it's pretty well hidden, isn't it.
Suw, it definitely is the chat. Has it just been introduced on your account? It appeared without warning on my account back in January or February, and I had over a month of gmail just. not. working. It was dreadful. The, just as mysteriously, it was fine again.
But hey, we all signed up knowing it's still in beta, right?

Anonymous June 23, 2006 at 8:42 am

With mine, it was the other way round – it worked ok to start with, but then just got slower and slower and eventually i realised i was wasting about 10 mins each hour waiting for my browser to unlock after the script became unresponsive. Now all seems much, much better.

Anonymous June 23, 2006 at 4:10 pm

Aah… fair enough, I have to admit to being similarly reluctant to file things, but haven't yet really taken advantage of gails features in that respect. Still, this might help:
http://www.indev.ca/MailTags.html

Anonymous June 23, 2006 at 11:06 pm

“Even typing an email is now a real pain in the ass”
We're British, darling: we say “arse”.

Anonymous June 24, 2006 at 9:29 am

Oh god… I didn't, did I? I did! Oh no…
It's that T'Other bloke. He's brainwashing me.

Anonymous June 25, 2006 at 11:12 am

It's all right, hon. You're in love and therefore incharacteristically susceptible and incapable of thinking wholly for yourself. 😛
Getting vaguely back on topic: I haven't actually logged in to Gmail for ages because I've set up Outlook Express to check my Gmail inbox. Like you, I think the labelling functions on Gmail are what make it stand out from the crowd. I have set up a bunch of folders and message rules on Outlook but it is a bit time-consuming.

Anonymous April 10, 2007 at 4:56 pm

I had lag problems with gmail as well, especially when my mail archives started to pile up. Someone suggested that it might be the speed of my connection but that wouldn't make sense even if i didn't have a residential t-1line from http://t1-connection.com. They need to fix the problems quickly or risk permanently losing a lot of users.

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