Late deliveries from the Gmail laundry

February 14, 2008 in Past, problems | 10 comments

I love Gmail for one thing: it launders spam out of mail going to my searls.com address. I have things set up so Gmail picks it up from my server, and I pick it up from Gmail. Last I checked, there were over 22,000 spams in Gmail’s spam box. And the last I went through ten pages (50 each) of those, there were no false finds.

But lately I haven’t been getting mail to Searls.com. Didn’t know what it was, but my wife just figured it out and provided helpful tech support. I needed to go into Settings in my Gmail account, then to Accounts, then down to Get mail from other accounts, and see when my mail was last picked up. Turns out it was 9 February. Here’s what the Fetch History said…

Now it says this:

So, some questions that maybe some of ya’ll can answer…

  1. Why did Gmail choke on the “timed out” message from my mail server, and not go back again?
  2. Why was it checking my server every several minutes before, and only every hour or so now?
  3. Can I make it speed up somehow? If so, where are those controls?

Here’s hoping my own conundrum may be helpful to others as well. No idea.

It is one helluva spam filter, I gotta say.

10 comments

  1. Richard Carter’s avatar

    Richard Carter on February 15, 2008 at 2:00 am

    Thanks very much. I’ve been having similar problems lately. Will check this out.

  2. Derrick Kwa’s avatar

    Derrick Kwa on February 16, 2008 at 12:31 am

    I’ve been wondering how to speed it up as well. Never managed to figure out. Will be keeping track here to see what you find out. =).

  3. Jim Thompson’s avatar

    Jim Thompson on February 17, 2008 at 9:09 am

    I’ll stop looking for the problem now..

  4. Doc Searls’s avatar

    Doc Searls on February 17, 2008 at 10:30 am

    It seems to be back to “normal” now. Meaning it picks up every few minutes. It also lets me “get mail now”, which it wasn’t doing before.

    Not sure what’s up with that, but at least it’s over. And having me think twice (and more) about dependencies on giant providers, even relatively nice ones such as Google.

  5. Kyle’s avatar

    Kyle on February 17, 2008 at 4:41 pm

    Doc, I have a question on which you might have an opinion. I also use gmail to get my ISP (Cox) mail. But I do it by forwarding all mail from Cox to gmail, rather than by pop3 fetch.

    Lately I’ve been getting more spam to Cox, and some of it is getting in the gmail Inbox.

    Do you think gmail’s spam filter works better if gmail fetches the mail, rather than by forwarding?
    Thanks!

  6. Jim Thompson’s avatar

    Jim Thompson on February 17, 2008 at 6:04 pm

    > having me think twice (and more) about dependencies on giant providers,

    Actually, I’m considering moving the email for netgate.com to Google’s hosted stuff, rather than continuing to operate a hosted server just for email.

    Amazon’s S3 outage is worrying though.

  7. Doc Searls’s avatar

    Doc Searls on February 18, 2008 at 7:03 am

    Kyle, I think Gmail’s filters are imperfect, but better than pretty much everything else. I’ve had a lot more spam gettng through lately as well. It goes up and down.

  8. gregory’s avatar

    gregory on February 19, 2008 at 12:43 pm

    i think google’s pipes are getting full…. lots of little signs, and of course some of it could be the www

  9. Jonny’s avatar

    Jonny on October 17, 2008 at 10:40 am

    Maybe its because google’s share prices are dropping so they have to cut costs somewhere…..

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