I started using gmail in January and ever since I’ve told anyone who will listen how superior it is to using a regular email application like Outlook. I have four email addresses routing to gmail, as well as my actual gmail account. Over the past week I have noticed that I wasn’t receiving as many emails as I usually do. And all of the email notifications I get from other sites about their new content seemed to be a little thin on the ground. Must be a slow week, I thought. It was just as well, I was battling a bad head cold last week that turned into an ear infection. I couldn’t really hold an intelligent thought long enough in my head last week to actually act on it, otherwise I might have realized there was a problem with my email sooner. This morning as I surveyed my inbox and looked over the items that were starred and waiting for responses, I surmised that I wasn’t receiving all my mail. It wasn’t just a slow week, there was a bloackage in the pipeline somewhere. When I looked under Settings > Accounts in gmail I saw a bright red warning - Error: Too many messages to download. Mail from this account has not been received since April 15.
April 15th! Stupid gmail I thought. Couldn’t I have received some sort of notification about this! The party’s finally over and my new most favourite web application had failed me. But, turns out, I had failed me. When I had set up the forwarding of my email I had the box checked to leave a copy of my messages on the server. There were over 50 000 messages there!
So now I’m in the process of downloading them all so that the server will be cleared and I can get back to emailing with gmail. It’s been downloading for hours now and it’s only at 16764.
So here’s a tip – unless you’re only temporarily using gmail for an email address, don’t leave the messages on the server, because after long term use, one day it’ll all get stuck!