Email Woes

A few years ago, Rogers lost my email. It was infuriating. It simply didn’t exist for more than two weeks and no one seemed upset about it except me. I even contacted my former (distant) Rogers colleague, now Mayor of Toronto John Tory, and begged him to get in touch with a higher-up at Rogers which he did. And that’s how I found out why no one cared too much.  

I was one of six people in the country whose email was compromised. Who cares about six people? They eventually restored most of it but I was ready to burst by the time they did. I did a ton of research and asked around for expert opinions and decided to go with Gmail for their reliability.

On a Monday morning, I typically wake up to an inbox with anywhere from 30 to 70 emails in it so I was surprised to see only four. When I had the time, I checked with some of my voice-job-sites so see if jobs had been posted. They had, but my automatic alerts hadn’t arrived. Something was fishy.

It was so quiet all day that I wondered if I’d forgotten about a holiday! So I looked up troubleshooting and checked it all. Filters, POP, forwarding, blocking, my spam folder, my all mail folder, you name it, I checked it. Everything was fine. No one in the chain was reporting service problems. Late in the day, a couple of old emails popped in, and that’s what’s continued to happen. I get the occasional current email after anywhere from a few minutes to a two-hour delay and an old one or two will appear here and there. Some have been lingering out there in cyberspace for 18-24 hours. But it’s still not right, I can feel it. I access my gmail via the web so I’m at the source and it’s not my smartphone. It’s something stupid.

Everyone is stumped. I tweeted to Google to help me, with no reply! The forums are useless. As I wrote this, an email from my brother-in-law arrived that was time-stamped 18 hours earlier. Google did send me a page, from an email address I can’t reply to, that requires me to copy and paste the headers of every single email I didn’t receive, or they won’t investigate. Fat chance.

I don’t want to have to break up with another email service but no one seems to have an idea of what’s going on. The general advice is to “wait it out” and it will resolve itself. Okay, but how am I supposed to have confidence in it again?

4 thoughts on “Email Woes”

  1. Are you on a free Gmail account or a paid Google Apps account? If the latter, you have better support options that I can walk you through. Unfortunately, the free accounts come with no SLA (service level agreement).

  2. A free Gmail account. 🙁 The good news is, emails are now coming in fairly normally again. I just have to hope it doesn’t happen again!

  3. Unavailable email does alter life as we know it. I recently read an article that purported email to be nor addictive than cigarettes and alcohol combined.

  4. Even though your Gmail is working now, if you are accessing from a computer or laptop, try using a different browser or resetting the one you use if it happens again. Just a suggestion. That has worked for me.

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