Over the last few weeks I’ve noticed Gmail has become very sluggish when performing common tasks, like sending mail.

It also occurs when performing searches, or refreshing the inbox. In each case, the delay is about 5 to 10 seconds – which is something I haven’t experienced before.

I recall reading about this in the New York Times a while back – they linked to a blog post about it, so it seems to be a very real problem, that I surmise could only get worse for me.

I am currently at 2.3 GB out of 27.3 GB, after purchasing additional Google storage a while back.

The theory from the blog post linked above is that the slowness only starts occurring after reaching 4 GB capacity used. I’m not sure if that is completely accurate, but my experience is suggesting that it’s not.

Regardless, I’m hoping Google addresses this issue soon, otherwise I’ll have to start exporting my email for backup, deleting old messages, and possibly switching to another email service provider.

I’m assuming this issue is only noticeable using the Gmail web interface, so maybe if I use IMAP exclusively, it won’t be a big deal.

It might be a good technical experiment to try anyway – IE: “Removing my dependence on Gmail.”

That’s a blog post for another day.