> If someone hands over you a free glass of wine, which they've tried their level best to make it perfect, you just drink it instead of trying to suddenly become a food critic
I think this is a bogus argument. If someone hands me a free glass of "wine" and it turns out to be undrinkable swill instead of wine, I'm pretty sure I would point this out.
With regards to email, people expect email to be fast, and if your email servers routinely take a long time to make a delivery, you are not giving people what they would expect from your service, free or not.
I say this as someone who was a sysadmin for a number of years and maintained email servers. If our email servers took two hours to deliver a piece of email, and it was the fault of our servers, I would have considered this to be an urgent issue to resolve.
All this being said, I'm pretty happy with Gmail myself.
Can you please justify how Gmail, an Email client used by probably millions of users suddenly turns out 'un-drinkable' to the author (and to you)?
Can you send E-mails? Yes.
Can you receive E-mails? Yes.
Can you forward E-mails? Yes.
(^Note: This is a paid feature on other popular clients)
Can you read all the E-mails you've sent and received? Yes.
Are you paying for it? No.
So, how does this become 'un-drinkable'? Your e-mail was delivered despite the delay. It would be fair to call it undrinkable if your email wasn't delivered. AFAIK No one promised you they would deliver it within 'x' minutes.
For heaven's sake, it's a bug. People make mistakes, Softwares contain bugs, I'm sure with all your experience put together, you know this better than me. Why make such a huge fuss out of this? How does such a minor problem affecting only a fraction of Gmail users suddenly become Gmail's Second biggest problem?
> Can you please justify how Gmail, an Email client used by probably millions of users suddenly turns out 'un-drinkable' to the author (and to you)?
If I routinely experienced delays of two hours with Gmail, I would find it undrinkable. For instance, I arrange to meet people using Gmail. Sometimes for important events. E.g., my girlfriend tells me at what time I should come over, and she often gives me little notice. Or we'll arrange when and where to me for a concert shortly before the event.
I've been using email for this purpose for my entire adult life, and it has almost always worked for this purpose just fine.
Since I don't typically experience the kind of delays mentioned by the OP, I am happy with Gmail. If I did experience them, I would be as unhappy with Gmail as the OP.
> How does such a minor problem affecting only a fraction of Gmail users suddenly become Gmail's Second biggest problem?
In my opinion the problem is this: the larger the mailbox or the more often you use Gmail, to higher are the odds of facing described problems. I.e. the heavy users have most problems. So there is the problem, it's just a matter of time until someone else solves it. When someone else solves it, it means those heavy users will migrate to this someone else. (Remember they were also the first who actually had any reasonable use-case in Gmail, that used to be advertised as Mailbox for messies/people with many mails.) The rest will just follow automatically, it's always like that. ;)
Also, is it your claim that if it frequently took two weeks for Gmail to deliver some emails, then that would be OK because Gmail is free? After all, even if it took two weeks, you could still send E-mails, receive E-mails, and forward E-mails.
For many purposes, two hours might as well be two weeks or two years.
Barring network outages and the like, people expect email to be delivered within two minutes, not two years, two weeks, or two hours.
I think this is a bogus argument. If someone hands me a free glass of "wine" and it turns out to be undrinkable swill instead of wine, I'm pretty sure I would point this out.
With regards to email, people expect email to be fast, and if your email servers routinely take a long time to make a delivery, you are not giving people what they would expect from your service, free or not.
I say this as someone who was a sysadmin for a number of years and maintained email servers. If our email servers took two hours to deliver a piece of email, and it was the fault of our servers, I would have considered this to be an urgent issue to resolve.
All this being said, I'm pretty happy with Gmail myself.