Posted on November 24, 2006 - by John

Is G-mail all it’s cracked up to be?

G mail was an instant hit, when it was launched with near unlimited space (GBs of space  a first for web mail) which prompted other popular web mail services, such as Y! Mail and Hotmail to increase their storage capacity, to stay in the game. Google Mail (G-mail) also had an air of exclusivity to it, and as you know exclusivity means to exclude, what people perceive as something they cannot have, they immediately want it. So, rather than allow people sign up for the service, G-mail allowed current members to send invitations to their friends, this allowed for the service to market itself effectively and without much effort and increase demand, while also allowing the service not to reach capacity immediately at launch. Eventually, it is assumed that people will be able to sign up without an invite.

Google describes its service as:

Gmail is Google’s free webmail service. It comes with built-in Google search technology and over 2,600 megabytes of storage (and growing every day). You can keep all your important messages, files and pictures forever, use search to quickly and easily find anything you’re looking for, and make sense of it all with a new way of viewing messages as part of conversations

However, is this service as good as they say?

Not really, although you can do all these wonderful things: You can send and receive large documents, you can archive everything, its got a spam catcher (gets most of the spam - and a few real messages too), it is integrated with chat, it is easy to find old documents fast, and it has the added advantage of access to Google’s online word processor and calendar.

However, recently, I simply cannot use the service; I get various errors such as “(error code 007). Please try again in a few seconds”. It is then you realise, it’s been two days, and I can’t read, or send e-mail, and there is no support of any kind (that I can see). There is no explanation as to when the service will return, and what the problem is, will it happen again?

This is the downfall of a super feature-packed service that is FREE, where is the support? I suppose we cannot complain when the service is free, but when you consider all the text ads on the mail service, it’s not free at all; you do have to look at those ads, so obviously it goes without saying Google makes a hell of a lot of money from this, while minimising costs, like the cost of a support team to handle complaints?

Don’t get me wrong, I do like G-mail – when you cant get to read your mail, it can be a bit frustrating.

So, what’s the story Google? Where is my e-mail and were is the support?