When Gmail let me down

I have a couple of gmail accounts. One for the day-to-day stuff and one for the blog. And I have to say that for a free service, it is superb. It’s got a lovely intuitive interface, it’s always accessible and it’s very reliable. Until today – or rather November – it was, anyway.

I went onto my “blog” gmail today to send an email, which is a bit of an unusual occurrence (99% of its use is receiving email). No issues thus far, the inbox mildly replete with a few Superbru reminders (I don’t really use them) and a handful of PR emails. Once I’d sent the email I went in there to write, I decided to tidy out the inbox, but as soon as I had deleted the 23 items in there, another 142 suddenly arrived. In one lump. They weren’t there before. Honest.

I think I would have noticed.

Mostly nowt important – stuff from The Pixies about their latest re-release, more Superbru reminders, some abuse jokes about Eskom, and a couple of missives from WordPress.com. But the earliest one dated back to November 26th. So 2½ months of emails in one go. And moreover, the wodge included 4 emails from early December which were time sensitive and are now well past their use by date and have made me look rude and/or lazy and/or a bit crap.

Ugh. Apology emails are on their way out right now.

Looking back at the emails I deleted, they were interspersed with the ones that arrived in one huge lump, so Gmail was apparently sending some emails through, but not others. So this was some sort of selective constipation, which makes it even more weird. Googling gives no possible explanation, but then what do you type into the search box – it’s one of those difficult things to Google (such things remain Google’s biggest (only?) major fault).

Has this ever happened to you? Or can you suggest a reason why it might have happened to me? (Please leave my atheism out of any possible explanation.)
There’s no indication that this is happening or has happened on any other gmail account running on the 6000.co.za domain.

Colour me confused. Shade me embarrassed. And tint me acutely disappointed.