Gmail Website Down? Get your mails anyway

Martin Brinkmann
Mar 4, 2007
Updated • Sep 16, 2018
Email, Gmail
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15

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.

gmail access pop imap

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.

Summary
Gmail Website Down? Get your mails anyway
Article Name
Gmail Website Down? Get your mails anyway
Description
Find out what you can do if the Gmail website is not accessible but you need to access certain messages at that time.
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Ghacks Technology News
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Comments

  1. JMGG said on January 19, 2012 at 8:25 am
    Reply

    You said that Outlook isn’t your main email client, so which is your main one?

    1. BalaC said on January 19, 2012 at 9:42 am
      Reply

      I think its thunderbird

    2. Martin Brinkmann said on January 19, 2012 at 10:15 am
      Reply

      It is Mozilla Thunderbird.

  2. Salaam said on September 24, 2012 at 9:52 pm
    Reply

    Awesome! This actually solved my problem… what a stupid bug.

  3. Claud said on December 19, 2012 at 2:08 am
    Reply

    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.

    1. Lynda said on February 12, 2013 at 3:37 pm
      Reply

      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!!!!

    2. Chad said on November 20, 2018 at 4:24 pm
      Reply

      Solved my issue! 6 years later and this is still problem…

    3. Ivan X said on January 21, 2021 at 4:50 pm
      Reply

      Fantastic. Thank you. Size did the trick.

  4. Andrew said on October 26, 2013 at 7:06 am
    Reply

    This solved my Outlook problem, too. Thank you. :)

  5. Charles said on December 7, 2013 at 7:23 pm
    Reply

    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.

  6. garth said on November 7, 2014 at 7:13 pm
    Reply

    You are a god – thank you!

  7. Faisal said on February 9, 2015 at 10:09 am
    Reply

    thanks a lot…. work like charm.. :-)

  8. Simon said on March 24, 2015 at 11:36 pm
    Reply

    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

  9. Olu said on April 14, 2015 at 1:35 pm
    Reply

    Excellent post. This had me baffled even trying to accurately describe the problem. This fixed it for me.
    Thank you

  10. Coenig said on July 23, 2015 at 7:36 am
    Reply

    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 :-)

  11. Fali said on January 20, 2016 at 4:19 pm
    Reply

    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.

    1. MIki said on January 10, 2019 at 11:54 am
      Reply

      I’ve been tried to sole this problem for 12hours. Your comment about changing the display of screen helped me a lot!! Thanks!!

  12. Christina said on January 20, 2016 at 6:14 pm
    Reply

    Thank you…don’t know why this happened but your instructions helped me fix it. Running Windows 10 and office pro 2007

  13. Oz said on July 22, 2016 at 3:20 pm
    Reply

    Great tip! Thanks!

  14. Tracy said on September 1, 2016 at 4:48 pm
    Reply

    Worked for me, too – thank you!!!

  15. shawn said on September 9, 2016 at 10:25 am
    Reply

    It’s Worked for me, too
    thank you very much!

  16. Jari said on October 31, 2016 at 11:53 am
    Reply

    I had a similar issue with Outlook 2013 on Windows 10 and this helped me to fix it. Thank you very much!

  17. Michel H said on November 30, 2016 at 11:08 pm
    Reply

    Thank you so much. Solved!
    Considering you published this in 2012, incredible not been debugged by Microsoft.
    Thank you again. M

  18. Ziad Bitar said on January 9, 2017 at 2:00 am
    Reply

    This problem was faced by only one user logging to TS 2008 r2 using outlook 2010.The issue was resolved.

    Thanks.

  19. Anonymous said on February 15, 2017 at 5:24 pm
    Reply

    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.

  20. Rochelle said on March 6, 2017 at 11:59 am
    Reply

    Thank you, this worked !!!!

  21. anom1234 said on May 20, 2018 at 11:20 pm
    Reply

    Man, you are a fucking god. Thanks a lot, what an annoying bug!!

  22. JC said on October 12, 2020 at 2:14 pm
    Reply

    Awesome, this post solved the issue. Many thanks!

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