Google Gmail doing my head in

I don’t give a rats arrrr’s if somehow this is my fault!!. . . . but really?

What I’ve been putting up with for the past couple of months has become intolerable, unworkable and bordering on the almost insane. Ummm . . . but please stick with my story. :slight_smile:

For my email I use gmail. For the simple reason that changing ISP’s in the past has rendered the email address useless (I’m sure most of us have been there).

Just creating an email using gmail has become an almost futile exercise. Resulting in absurd, stupid and downright acceptable “fist slamming” on my computer keyboard.

What happens is this:

When I “compose” a new message, sometimes the input text box says TO: then it may change to RECIPIENTS: depending on it’s “whim” which I am not privy to. Even so, I accept that as some sort of whichever way, but then It gets worse.

When I type into the recipients panel it takes almost 10 seconds to come up with the “suggested” text. Fine, I could almost accept that. But what is far far far far far worse, is that when I start to type into the message panel (having been selected by the usual accepted method of clicking into it, and confirmed via the the cursor flashing in that field) The cursor jumps back to the recipients panel. Yes, jumps back to the recipient panel. Without my consent or knowledge. And then, do it again. Utterly absurd!!!

I’ve also noticed that when using google I usually could “right click” and have a contextual menu (mostly for spelling) but that takes 10-15secs to come up, if at all. (Firefox+WIN7)

My first thought is a Virus. But I have a well known brand of virus protection and have seen no warnings.

Either I have a virus that my virus protection program cannot evaluate or even give a reasonable warning about!, or I have a virus that my virus protection is able to be overridden, and someone, somewhere is taking control of my computer. OR perhaps due to his late night coding episodes, Steve Kelepouris has finally gone completely fcking mad!!

But seriously - I’m having a big issue using gmail. Has anyone else experienced something like this?

Why keep butting your head against a program that’s giving you so much grief. You can still use your gmail account, but create and read your mail with Apple Mail, Outlook, Thunderbird, etc, etc.

I’m using Windows. I’ve never really liked Outlook. Happy to try others.

I’m thinking that google-bot has an issue with my 6000+ unanswered messages. Google-bot tries to evaluate where, what, how, but those 6000 or so unanswered messages f*cks it up and therefore slows things down.

I’ve used ThunderBird for years, it can hook into gmail seamlessly but I mainly use it with my own mail server.

I use Thunderbird too on my laptop but on my main pc i use “eM Client” to control my mailboxes and cleanup the mailbox on the mailserver (http://www.emclient.com/). This program is faster and handles my 250,000 emails without slowing down. It also uses the screenspace more efficient.
They have a free version too that is very capable.

I am using Nylas email client (free version) on my mac with several gmail/gmail apps email account and works well.

I just forward my gmail account email to my co-located mac server and it all ends up in the same place where I can run my own email client or webmail client and the heck with them.

Also been using Thunderbird for years now on Windows. Would highly recommend it if you are looking for a free email client.

we have been using thunderbird on the mac since 2011. before than i was using outlook and it always hang on opening outlook… very frustrating

I would definitely recommend an actual email client. I’ve used opera mail recently for some of my pc using friends that don’t want or need to buy outlook. It seems quite usable and they also have a mac client as well.

As far as Gmail goes, I don’t think I would use gmail unless someone paid me a sizeable sum of money, and even then I’d still have another account on my own mail server. It weirds me out to know that Google or MS, or my ISP might be scanning my email so they can figure out how to target me with ads, track me online, or use my own emails to train their AI bots for whatever purpose. It’s bad enough that I have to correspond with people using gmail, or outlook.com.

My expertise is more for the Mac. Outlook/Mac is a stable mail client. For Windows there are lots of tools which try to repair pst files which is the format of Outlook. For smaller amounts of mails this probably is fine. Thunderbird is ugly and not much in development anymore.

Do you have an archive solution in place? For Windows there are lots of options. Have a look at MailStore.

@Kevin Windham: nowadays Google isn’t supposed to analyse your mails but who knows what they do. A lot of my customers use Gmail or it’s business version.

Check the terms of use and privacy policy. The clearly state they do it. The primary reasons they give are ad targeting and service improvement, but you can draw your own conclusions. Some of the language is quite loose and I don’t trust them. Some of the shenanigans YouTube is pulling also make me think that trusting Google with your data is not such a great idea. Of course some people think it’s great, so everyone has to decide for themselves.

@Steve Kelepouris: You mentioned having “6000+ unanswered messages.” Yikes!

Here’s an idea: Just delete them. If they were important, then the senders will resend them at some point. But chances are, they aren’t important at all.

I’m not sure if this will solve the technical issues that you’re running into, but it’s worth a try. If nothing else, getting rid of those unread messages will feel really good.

Good luck!

I am in a habit of keeping every piece of email I either receive or send (evidence is sometimes required months after the fact). I use Outlook as my email client. Outlook is connected to Exchange accounts, and also to a GMail account that I use for specific purposes. Every month, I move all 6-month old received or sent email to archives. I use rules for most accounts, but some corporate accounts do not allow creating such rules. In that case, I move mail elements manually. The archives are not live, but always accessible. It keeps my inboxes and folders manageable and all the history is there in case of need.