Dave Naffziger's Blog

Om recently stirred the pot with his post on the problems that they’ve been having with Gmail / Google Apps.

At BrandVerity, we’ve noticed several of the problems that he highlighted, but always assumed that it couldn’t be Google. In particular, I’m seeing:

• Spam Handling. I also think that Google Apps spam handling does a poorer job than regular gmail. I don’t have hard data to back this up, but I rarely get spam into my gmail account and regularly get spam in the Google Apps email accounts.
• Trouble loading the inbox. The blue loading bar would literally run from 0 to 100% 10 to 20 times before the inbox would appear. I was running FF RC3 at the time and the problem seems gone now so that could have been the issue.

I am not happy about those two, but they frankly aren’t critical. These next two are critical.

• Email sent is not being delivered. We use Google’s Apps Email as a dev/test SMTP server. Some mail simply never gets delivered. And it is isn’t consistent. Sometimes the emails get through, sometimes they don’t. And yes, we’re way below account limits. We obviously do not use this for production, but it is annoying nonetheless.
• Email is not being received. None of our transaction notifications from Authorize.Net get delivered to the inbox or spam folder. It is possible that other senders create similar problems.

In both cases, the problems seem to stem from automated systems that send from or send to google apps email accounts.

I’m getting pretty fed up dealing with the issues though and don’t really have any sense if a near-term solution is pending.