Surviving gMail 502 outages

I use mint to see live stats for the traffic to skfox.com and Google Analytics for the long term statistics. I’ve seen a resurgence today of traffic to my two blog posts (in March and again in May) about my gMail account being down. The most common for me is a “Temporary Error (502)” and it would seem to be happening to other users too. I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but there isn’t a whole lot you can do about it. On the short side, most of the outages only last 30 minutes or so with the longest being 3.5 hours. It can be terribly frustrating, but there are a few things you can do to alleviate the pain.

  • Use your email client like Outlook or Thunderbird to download your messages to your local machine with POP3 while keeping your gmail account unchanged. That way, even if gMail is inaccessible, you can get to your old email for reference. Of course, you have to do this once your account is up and running again.
  • Visit the gMail Google group to at the least find others in your boat and get the latest updates.
  • Check the Google Apps Status Page
  • Use Gmail Offline with Google Gears

Some users have reported success getting to their mail during outages by using any number of alternative links to gmail. Your mileage may vary, but here they are:

22 thoughts on “Surviving gMail 502 outages

  1. THANK YOU!! This is the first post I have found that acknowledges there is a problem today – I have been searching all morning. Thanks for the great post.
    Lindsay

  2. Pingback: Incoming links | SKFox

  3. The problem is back. I’ve been without GMail access for almost 18 hours now, due to error 502… on Google’s Forums there are a lot of other people who have the same problem, starting on 16 July.
    I have sent two emails to GMail Support but have received no reply.

  4. I feel your pain GlobetrotterSA. My Gmail has been down since last night and still hasn’t come back up. At least Google has acknowledged the problem.

  5. I switched to Gmail because I thought it would be great to have online access to my email. Today I started getting 502 errors around lunchtime (it’s now 6:30 pm). I’m seriously regretting switching back to my old email, it looks like this error is not all that uncommon. Thanks for posting this information, I was at least able to find out that Google knows about the problem.

  6. I meant to say I’m seriously regretting switching to Gmail and will likely go back to my old provider. It’s been a long day!

  7. Pingback: Another major gMail 502 outage | SKFox

  8. Thanks for the tips– which work!

    Terrifying to be without for as little as an hour.
    Even more so after having ZERO trouble for years.
    Hope it’s not an omen.

  9. Lately GMail has been completely unusable (502 error) and the service itself has been slow, unresponsive, and just all around terrible. I don’t believe I can rely on it any longer, Beta or not, this is unacceptable.

  10. Pingback: gMail 502 Outage [December 2008] | SKFox

  11. Yep…this error is affecting me…and none of the workarounds you suggest are helping me out…I guess I have to wait this one out!

  12. Pingback: Gmail 502 Outage [January 2009] | SKFox

  13. I have experiencing error 502 on my gmail account for more than 30 hours hours, i have been reading on ways to get around it but it’s all failed to cure my problem. i tried clearing cookies, using different browsers but nothing worked. i tried to log in on a couple of other machines using different browsers but nothing still. I REALLY need some help here. can anyone advice i am so desperate and gmail is my main email. i cannot afford it to be lost.

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