Gmail Website Down? Get your mails anyway
We had some reports coming in about Gmail (Google Mail) outages preventing users from accessing their mail accounts on the website for several hours.
This can be a big issue depending on how you are using Gmail. If you use it for work, it can be a serious problem as you cannot communicate with colleagues or customers in that time.
It is especially critical in situations where customers or colleagues require an immediate, or near real-time answer. If you cannot access your email account at all, you cannot read the emails nor respond to them which may lead to lost business among other issues.
Gmail can be inaccessible for a number of reasons. Maybe it is only the web interface that is not available, or, and this is more serious, the whole service is not accessible for a certain amount of time.
You can try and access Gmail using third party applications using Pop3 or IMAP protocols if only the web interface is not accessible. You do need to enable that feature first before you can do so though.
Amit discovered that he was able to retrieve mails from his Gmail account even though the web interface was down. This is a pretty neat trick which can be used, or at least tried, if you cannot connect to the gmail web interface.
To enable POP or IMAP for your Gmail account:
- Log in to your Gmail account.
- Click Settings at the top of any Gmail page.
- Click Forwarding and POP/IMAP at the top of the settings page.
- Select Enable POP for all mail or Enable POP for mail that arrives from now on.
- Choose the action you'd like your Gmail messages to take after they are accessed with POP.
- Configure your POP client* and click Save Changes. (pop.gmail.com, smtp.gmail.com)
- Or, select Enable IMAP and configure it instead.
A program that you can use to access Gmail via Pop3 or IMAP is Mozilla Thunderbird, a free email client. It is available for Windows, Linux and Mac OS X and easily installed and configured.
Update: Gmail users who need to have access to their messages at all times have now another option.
Google introduced native offline capabilities, check out our Gmail Offline guide here.The feature synchronizes the messages automatically when the user logs in, so that they become available even if the Gmail website is not accessible, or if the computer is not connected to the Internet.
This option works only in the Chrome browser and not in other web browsers like Firefox or Internet Explorer. Those users can still use an email client for that.
Note that this only provides you access with mails that you have previously received, not mails that are send to your Gmail account while the service is not available.
Another option is to use the Gmail client on your mobile phone, which should also work just fine if only the Gmail website is down but the service itself is operational.
You said that Outlook isn’t your main email client, so which is your main one?
I think its thunderbird
It is Mozilla Thunderbird.
Awesome! This actually solved my problem… what a stupid bug.
If this is the same bug that I’ve encountered, there may be another fix: (1) hover over open Outlook item in Taskbar, cursor up to hover over Outlook window item, and right-click; (2) this should give you Restore / Move / Size / Minimize / Maximize — choose Move or Size; (3) use your cursor keys, going arbitrarily N/S/E/W, to try to move or size the Outlook window back into view. Basically, the app behaves as though it were open in a 0x0 window, or at a location that’s offscreen, and this will frequently work to resize and/or move the window. Don’t forget to close while resized/moved, so that Outlook remembers the size/position for next time.
THANK YOU Claude!!! I could get the main window to launch but could not get any other message window to show on the desktop. You are my hero!!!!
Solved my issue! 6 years later and this is still problem…
Fantastic. Thank you. Size did the trick.
This solved my Outlook problem, too. Thank you. :)
Thank you so much, this started happening to me today and was causing big problems. You are a life saver, I hope I can help you in some way some day.
You are a god – thank you!
thanks a lot…. work like charm.. :-)
Yah…thanks Claude. I’ve been having the same problem and tried all the suggestions…your solution was the answer. It had resized itself to a 0/0 box. Cheers
Excellent post. This had me baffled even trying to accurately describe the problem. This fixed it for me.
Thank you
Thanks a lot for the article. Don’t know why it happenend, don’t know how it got fixed, but it was really annoying and now it works :-)
Thanks a lot. I was facing this issue from past 3 week. I tried everything but no resolution. The issue was happening intermittently and mainly when I was changing the display of screen ( as i use 2 monitors). The only option i had was to do system restore. But thanks to you.
I’ve been tried to sole this problem for 12hours. Your comment about changing the display of screen helped me a lot!! Thanks!!
Thank you…don’t know why this happened but your instructions helped me fix it. Running Windows 10 and office pro 2007
Great tip! Thanks!
Worked for me, too – thank you!!!
It’s Worked for me, too
thank you very much!
I had a similar issue with Outlook 2013 on Windows 10 and this helped me to fix it. Thank you very much!
Thank you so much. Solved!
Considering you published this in 2012, incredible not been debugged by Microsoft.
Thank you again. M
This problem was faced by only one user logging to TS 2008 r2 using outlook 2010.The issue was resolved.
Thanks.
Great tip. Thank you!!!! If it helps, I had to use the Control Key and the arrow keys at the same time to bring my window back into view. Worked like a charm.
Thank you, this worked !!!!
Man, you are a fucking god. Thanks a lot, what an annoying bug!!
Awesome, this post solved the issue. Many thanks!