- be an internet personality in a community with enough clout to make noise
- write blog post
- wait
- profit?? :)
Seriously, though, glad it was all worked out (and, more to the point, we now have a teeny tiny indication as to where this issue stems from - for other users with problems)
Gmail team already said that they are aware of the problem and they are working on it, way before his blog post. Some problems are not easy fix and no amount of blog posts by internet celebrities will speed up a solution significantly.
This problem was very easy to fix: move his account to another server. It took an amount of one blog post to trigger the solution. He got special attention.
Remember that facebook non-deleted picture discussed yesterday?
It's 404 now. I suspect (purely guessing) they specifically took that one picture down, but did not also "solve" the problem that left it there in the first place.
I quit a social network a few years ago, but they would not delete my account. So I logged in and changed my name to something like NameOfSocialNetworkRefusesToDeleteMyAccount. And vi-ola, the account disappeared in a day or so.
This guy is more than just an Internet celebrity though, this guy runs a search engine as a competitor to them -- why are they watching his blog? (Or did they come across it by accident?)
It might also just be that some people who work at Google who know some people working on Gmail read HN or his blog. They seem like the right demographic :)
it would seem to me that as a competitor to them, it's obvious that google would pay (at least a little) attention to gabriel's blog. of course, i'm sure getting mentioned in a NYT blog didn't hurt, either.
I once worked with some reasonably large shared Web hosting companies and they frequently "oversold" on bandwidth, capacity, and the like - quite normal practice in the field.. and if people complained about slowness (perhaps their server was unlucky to have a handful of heavy users on it), they could be moved to quieter servers.
Seems like a similar thing is happening with GMail. The difference, though, is that most GMail users aren't paying a bean ;-)
I think they swapped my account onto the old servers Gabe was on, because whilst mine was fast when I read the article, suddenly it's very slow (as in, 30 seconds to send an email slow).
I'd love to use Google Apps for my business, all employees already have Android phones so from that point of view it's a great idea. Things like this are what is stopping me from actually doing it.
That and I don't know if I could stand to be parted from mutt.
"How to get meaningful support from Google"
- be an internet personality in a community with enough clout to make noise
- write blog post
- wait
- profit?? :)
Seriously, though, glad it was all worked out (and, more to the point, we now have a teeny tiny indication as to where this issue stems from - for other users with problems)