All Quiet on the Google Front
April 14, 2012
All Quiet on the Google Front
As I write this I am am on hold to Google main line. I’ve been on hold for nearly an hour. “… Your call is important to us and we appreciate your patience. Please stay on the line and our next available representative will be with you shortly…”
How ironic that the help page for Google Groups says, “The new Google Groups is faster, more powerful, and just plain cool.” A few weeks ago, I noticed that Google de-listed Google Groups from the iGoogle menus and that all groups that are archive mirrors of external lists stopped working. As a maintainer of handful of such lists, I’ve been investigating the issue for a while, but the only information I have been able to garner is by word of mouth via Matz, the creator of Ruby, “friend of mine found out that recently google group started ignoring mails with List-ID header field.” How powerful cool is that?
When I finish this article I will hang-up the phone and proceed to deprecate a number of Google Groups that I manage, namely, ruby-talk-google, yaml-core, libxml-devel and rubygems-developers. All of which are mirrored lists. At first I will just put up a deprecation notice. In a few weeks I will remove the lists altogether. But I won’t stop there. The fact that these lists have all stopped working with the advent of Google’s recent push to the “new Google Groups” and that Google has not made a single announcement about this MAJOR feature deprecation is inexcusable. I have had my fair share of issues with Google in the past. The inability to sort my mail by sender has always been a pain in my gmail-side. And everyone knows Google’s customer support is notoriously non-existent. But I have always stayed with them because their web applications are generally excellent and really outstrip the competition in most respects, not the least of which is online availability, which makes them extremely convenient. Until recently I also felt that Google followed their company motto of “Do No Evil” fairly well. And yet it seems Google, like so many giants of the past, has begun to topple and loose sight of its foundations.
So, I plan to find a new home for my other non-mirrored lists as well. And sometime after that I will begin to look into new email options. I am hopeful, by the end of the year I will be Google free –for the first time since I first “googled” the Internet way back in 1999.
Speaking of time. I’ve now been on hold for two-hours. I think it’s time the throw in the old towel. I have a lot of “Googleblechs!” to clean up.
[UPDATE] A few days after I wrote this, Google mysteriously fixed the issue, and now all mailing-lists are back online. I graciously concede that they have saved themselves from my abandonment, but only for the fact that there appear to be no comparable alternatives.