Like most of my geeky friends, I’m darned impressed with google. They clearly have some incredible brain power at all levels of their organization. They do lots of good stuff, useful stuff, they are making a name for themselves by making steak, not just sizzle.

However, I caught a glimpse of them looking like a plain old annoying company this week. The issue was with my gmail account. I’d been receiving a whole bunch of copies of “returned to sender” mail. Apparently my address got used in a huge spam mailing or something, or maybe in a virus or something. Whatever the case, definitely a super-human number of these things, like, in the tens of thousands. This wasn’t me or anyone else sending mail that got returned, this was some computer issue.

All of my email gets delivered to two mailboxes, and curiously my HoosierNet mailbox didn’t get flooded with these things. Maybe some of my filters there caught all of these, but I don’t know. But I did see a lot of them being delivered to my gmail account last Friday.

Well, Monday or Tuesday of this week, I was having some trouble with my gmail account, and I noticed that it said something very much like “You are currently using 2655 MB (100%) of your 2656 MB.” What?? Now, I get a LOT of email, and I never clean it out of my gmail account, so I’m accustomed to there being like 550M or so up there. But….? Woah. Apparently those returned-to-sender messages were worse than I thought!

So, I figure, I just need to delete them. Should be a no brainer, right? Search for ‘mailer-daemon’, and delete all the results. WRONG! There is no “delete all the results of this search” feature. wtf? I mean, every mail program has that, right? If you can figure out how to do a mass “select” then you can do a mass “delete selected”. Not gmail. You can only delete one screen at a time, which seemed to be 20, if I was looking at search results (even though I set my preferences for 100 on a page… search results are still 20. I might be missing something, but I can’t find it if so).

Figuring that this was just crazy, that those smart-apples at google certainly thought of this, and want to make it easy for me… I searched the documentation. Nope. As with so many documentations, it answered lots of questions, but none of them were about this. They did link me to a web forum type place where lots of people were complaining about gmail. Gotta hand it to them for that. But, yeah, there I found lots of people complaining about the exact same issue… no mass delete.

So, I ran through the motions one more time, but decided it was time to contact them. Like lots of websites, they first scanned the question that I’d entered and showed me a bunch of links for help pages that might help. The links were pathetic. They were nowhere near what my problem was. I mean, they seemed just like an average company, but if I worked for google and knew that the world viewed my company as the company who made sense out of web searches, I would be embarrassed to look like such a sluff on this search.

So, I submitted my question. I got an automated response almost immediately, again suggesting that I check out some help pages. I replied and said that they didn’t have anything to do with my problem.

A day or so later, I got a reply that said that they didn’t have a mass delete feature, but thanks for suggesting it, and they are working on it.

The point is not that this is horrible. It’s not that google is evil. The point is… this seems so… typical. Google is the company that my friends and I keep marvelling at that they do everything so well and don’t hand out the typical crap. Well, this seemed like totally typical crap. No worse than average, but if Google ever seems average, they will probably go bust immediately. Their whole business model is based on being better than average. They seemed average at best in this case.

Ok, whatever. I decided I’d delete many screens of the dumb messages and at least try to free up a few MB of space. I did… it was very slow, but I probably did about 1000 conversations. And, when I looked down… 555MB used (20%)! Woah! I don’t know if one of those conversations was a bunch of replies to itself and actually had 10,000 messages in it or what… I wasn’t paying close enough attention. However, I had a working gmail account again! Yay!

As glad as I am to have it working again, I still have to pause and think… “If a HoosierNet customer wrote to use with a similar complaint, we would have temporarily upped their quota, taught them how to mass delete things, and offered to do the mass deleting for them if they seemed confused.” To think that our podunk Indiana nonprofit ISP is offering better customer service for this particular kind of problem than is the mighty Google… hopefully it’s just a soft spot for them and not a harbinger. For all that I love about them, I certainly do hope so.