Gmail has been having some problems lately. Several users have announced that Google’s webmail service keeps resending messages to their recipients. So if you suddenly discover a triple copy of the same mail in your inbox, do know that your friends were not ill intentioned, or spammers, the service is simply not working properly. Ever since Tuesday, many users have filed a high number of posts on the pages of the official Gmail Help Forum. They were all complaining about the same thing, this recently encountered problem which managed to annoy quite a high number of people, mostly on the receiving end.
In a thread that you can find here, a certain MrEvan which has the ‘Google Employee’ status mentioned that Google was aware of the problem and working on a solution. Multiple users posted that friends of theirs were complaining about receiving the same message three or four times in a row. According to PC World the affected users were using a variety of operating systems, web browsers and mail client software. The problem has been around for multiple days but most people noticed this was happening (or decided to complain about it) on Tuesday. The problem seems to happen only with some messages and affects certain recipients. Once it does happen it causes a lot of embarrassment for the senders. On top of being sent more then one time, several days later, the e-mails are sent again.
Earlier today the Google Employee announced that the search engine giant has found the root cause behind the issue and is working on the problem. He also reassured users that the issue should be fixed very very soon.
MrEvan also mentioned that: “The messages of yours that were re-sent automatically over the past few days may be re-sent once today if they have not been already, but should not be re-sent again after the one time today. If this just affected you in the last hour or so, your message(s) should not go out again. Any new messages you send now will not be affected”. At the end of the post, Google’s employee also took the time to apologize for the inconvenience created and stated that this is an isolated issue. Hopefully Gmail users won’t encounter any more problems from now on.
On the bright side, Gmail users have recently received a brand new voice service which allows them to call US and Canadian landline and mobile phone numbers for free, straight from their web mail. Voice calls to other countries are also possible but they are billed. The rates for them start at two cents per minute. If yesterday most people didn’t see the latest feature in their Gmail, today it looks like the feature has become available. In order to make a call a user simply has to click on ‘Call phone’ which is displayed in the chat on the left hand site. As soon as the Voice application pops up on the lower left lower side of the screen, the user can simply dial a phone number and be instantly connected.
