Ready to quit Gmail

[yendi]

I love Gmail, in terms of interface, search capabilities, etc.

But for the last four months, at least once a day, my Gmail account will lock up and give me this error. Usually, this lasts for fifteen minutes, and is annoying, but not much more.

Right now, I haven't been able to check Gmail since 10 last night. When I fill out the "report the problem to us" form, I get a response telling me that it's a temporary error and I should try again in 30 seconds.

Since all of my freelance work, most of my professional association/learning stuff, and all of my personal correspondence, exists in Gmail, I am, needless to say, annoyed.

(And no, checking via imap does no good.)

I'm ready to switch email providers. But I haven't used another provider (other than work) for a while. So tell me, folks, what's a good email provider that offers:

1. Free email.

2. Good web and imap functionality.

3. A decent amount of space.

4. Actual customer service?

Also, needless to say, if you've emailed me in the last twelve hours, I haven't gotten it, and even if you emailed me before then, I can't exactly respond.

ETA: In case anyone's wondering, the rest of my Google accounts are fine (including Plus and Reader), so it's not a matter of being locked out or whatnot.

Comments

[unquietsoul5.livejournal.com]

Thats VERY strange. I have not see any problems with Gmail at all in several years that I can remember.

I have zero knowledge of any surviving email providers in the USA that fit your criteria by the way. The 4th has with every provider I've ever known been an issue, Gmail was the first and only one that gave 3 that I am aware of.

[yendi]

I've had these problems for a while, and checking the forums reveals that they happen often, although few last this long. That said, there are a bunch of posts from people in my current boat, and I'm not seeing any sign that their problems ever got resolved.

[unquietsoul5.livejournal.com]

My only guess would be that they have a bank of bad servers somewhere in the system that regularly have addressing problems so the system randomly forgets they exist and needs to renew routing to them for access... or that they have some storage issues that their existing redundancy isn't keeping up with (maybe drives with very different bus speeds or actual rpm speeds that keep falling out of synch and giving other errors that aren't being passed along to you).

These sorts of things would affect one group of users, and be non-existant for folks who aren't on that server cluster in any way....

But I'm not a networking expert and certainly not on tech of the level needed for the sort of huge operations that Google must be running, so I could be totally off the mark on all this.

[adam-0oo.livejournal.com]

I have accounts with Hotmail, Excite, Yahoo and AIM. The first three have the most similar functions to GMail, but are full of ads and are slow and suck. The only one I can stand is AIM, and that is because it has a relitively simple, low memory interface.

[yendi]

Thanks. AIM sounds like the best bet (especially since it seems to have decent IMAP functionality, too). At this point, it's now a matter of seeing if I can ever get back into my gmail to actually consider starting to forward stuff and contact people.

[kk1raven.livejournal.com]

Fastmail.fm offers free webmail and IMAP service. Using their POP and SMTP servers requires paying for an account as does getting a larger amount of storage space. I had a free account for a number of years before deciding to switch to a paid account several years ago. I'm very happy with them and $20/year is a small price to pay for extremely reliable e-mail. The only time I've ever needed to contact customer service they got back to me quickly with instructions on how to change the setting that was bothering me.

[yendi]

Thanks -- I'll look into them, too.

[kk1raven.livejournal.com]

They give a referral credit, so feel free to give them my address if you sign up for an account and they ask you who referred you. (kknight at fastmail dot fm). This link will supposedly take you to the sign up page with the referral info filled in http://www.fastmail.fm/?STKI=15209 .