Flaky Gmail servers

I've been seeing this more frequently in recent days:

This is a Gmail error message which pops up from your system tray in Windows when the Gmail notifier - a very useful tool - can't connect to the Gmail server, with the little icon in the system tray showing an exclamation mark.

I realized just now that I've been seeing this little popup out of the corner of my eye at least a dozen times a day recently. It seems that the connection error is momentary as often, a few seconds after the popup, there comes a new-mail notification and the little icon loses its exclamation mark.

I wonder what's going on with Gmail's servers or whatever it is?

Comments

[Tris Hussey]

Actually I think it's the Windows GMail notifier being flakey. I'm using the Firefox one, after using the Windows apps for a long time, and I haven't seen any trouble. I think the Windows app tries to connect in some other way than http. Whereas the Firefox one goes right to the server.

Very interesting, I agree.

[Neville Hobson]

Tris, I have the notifier set up to use IE not Firefox, wholly because every time I used it with Firefox, Firefox crashed. But that was a couple of versions ago so maybe things are different now. I'll try Firefox and see if that makes any difference.

Mind you, I've not seen any of the error popups today at all...

[Tris Hussey]

Yeah, the newest one is quite nice and stable. I didn't like the old one before either. The only drawback to the Firefox one is that it doesn't give you the subject and snippet of text like the Windows one. But since I download all my GMail into Thunderbird, it's just a backup anyway.

[~Angel~]

I thought it was the Gmail notifier too, but when I tried to check it from my PPC and from firefox, I still couldn't connect to my account.

[Neville Hobson]

The funny thing is that since I posted about the Gmail notifier, I've not had a single instance of this error. And I've not changed the options to use Firefox: I'm still using IE.

One thing I have had, though, over the past couple of days is constant requests from the Gmail server to log in, even though I'm set up to do that automatically. I also have Outlook config'd to get mail from Gmail (so I see all email from different services in Outlook) and I've also had Outlook requests for log in info, even though Outlook knows that info.

Is this anything to do with the error I originally posted about? Probably not, but I don't actually know.

[Allan Jenkins]

I just got the error while accessing Gmail directly using Firefox (I don't use the notifier). So it's presumably at Google's end, not yours.