Why Google Should Acquire Oopsmail

I bet you did not know there was a service called Oopsmail:

Oopsmail offers simplicity!   It is the simplest email you will ever find anywhere.

… YOU should be the one to decide what mail you want to receive and what you don’t… not your ISP or email provider!   With OopsMail.com you will always receive 100% of the email sent to you! We let you set up your own email filters to discard the junk email rather than presuming that we know what’s best for you. It’s time to take back your Email Independence!!!

Let me translate that.  They turn lacking a fundamental feature into a virtue.  In contrast, Gmail’s best feature is its legendary spam filter – in fact I relied on it long before become an active Gmail-user.

So Google certainly does not need Oopsmail for their technology – but then why should they acquire it?

Because they already are.  Oopsmail, that is.

Yes, formerly rock-solid Gmail has been ill a lot lately. The “Oops…the system encountered a problem (#500) – Retrying in 1:30” error message has became a daily occurance…  in fact several times a day.  Today almost permanently.

Don’t fall for the “Retry now” trap – it’s Gmail’s penalty button, every time you click it, the wait counter increases by a minute.  But even if you don’t click the penalty button, the counter increases by itself anyway. Basically as soon as you see the Oops error, you might as well close the browser tab (or browser itself), as it won’t recover on its own.  When you come back, you’ve lost some of your work – i.e. your read mail becomes unread again, newly assigned labels are gone ..etc.

I am a fan of Gmail, in fact I believe all of us @ CloudAve are heavy users, but these reliability issues, known but not addressed for an extended period are questioning how wise my choice really is.  I hope Google will fix these problems.  They MUST.  Gmail is the crown jewel of Google Apps. In fact without Gmail and Calendar there wouldn’t be Google Apps at all.