If you’re a Gmail (or Google Apps Mail) user, then you’ve probably seen this lately.

A few months back, Google pushed out a newer, “faster” version of Gmail, which by all accouts is faster. It appears (to this non techie programmer), that some of the things are done in javacript locally, then “pushed” (of sorts) to the server. I say this because whenever this error crops up, you can keep doing things locally, but they will never “take effect”. Anything you do post error will be ignored by Gmail until you close that browser window/tab and reopen Gmail in another tab or something.

One of the really annoying things about this error is that it never ever EVER goes away. It says to retry in “X” seconds, which it does, and then fails again. In all the times this has happend (and its happened a lot), it has never once recovered. You have to quit and restart. Annoying.  After reading their online help for this error message, I got this:

A conflict with software on your computer, browser cache that needs to be cleared, or a temporary problem on the Gmail server.

I clear my browser cache quite regularly, so it’s not that. Additionally this happens across multiple browsers, and has been happening for weeks, so I doubt it’s truly JUST a local cache issue. conflict with software? That’s nice – care to tell me WHAT software? Blaming it on other software without naming said software is a “shift the blame” tactic. It’s a cheap answer for tech support. “Not our problem, something else is interfering, but we don’t know what”. FAIL.

It’s happening on the order of two dozen times a day now, and it’s seriously annoying. I went through their help, and nothing helped. I tried right now when I made this blog post to add mail.google.com to my local browser cookie control, and set to allow. Let’s see if this makes any difference. I’m tired of dismissing this error. :(