This is something I have been noticing over time, and has been steadily getting worse over about the past 2-4months. Back in the end of October last year I posted about how Gmail had finally added IMAP support to their giant web mail service, this was of course fantastic news! After various amounts of hacking with Gmail settings to get IMAP on my account I had it delivering my mail through Thunderbird with little to no effort.

Initially, this was fine, had no problems with it, a bit of confusion on how folders/labels worked, but once you get your head round it was ok. But I’ve just noticed that a growing problem is occuring, and it’s that the IMAP server they have, or the code behind it, just can’t keep up with demand anymore.

I find that especially in the mornings Gmail’s IMAP generally becomes completely un-contactable, and even if it is, my login details won’t work and Thunderbird will be constantly asking for them in its attempts to log me in. The length’s of these outages can range anywhere from 5minutes to 5hours, I’ve gone the entire morning without access sometimes. Obviously if I was really desperate to read my mail I would use the website, which I don’t think I have ever had problems with, but that’s not the point, I prefer to read my Gmail in a standard mail client.

Google had to come up with some sort of major hackery to get IMAP working with their product, is it finally showing the flaws now since that I suspect every man, woman and dog are using it? Only time will tell, I’d like to think that it’ll get better and these stability issues will disappear, as quite frankly I love my Gmail account, and it would be a shame and a major pain in the arse if I had to give it up.