Gmail

[rudids]

Good Day Everyone,

It appears that WBS in a very sad attempt to save bandwith are routing all requests to www.google.com to www.google.co.za instead. This isn't that much of a problem, except for the fact that mail.google.co.za does not exist.

Any attempt to try and access mail.google.com fails. I am hoping this is just me, but I fear otherwise.

Please could you try access GMail and post results in this thread.

P.S - I've pinged mail.google.com and it is up.

 

[RichardP]

Hi there...

mail.google.com does not get redirected to any .co.za domain... I tried on iBurst and ADSL with same results. Logged in to Gmail fine

Richard

Good Day Everyone,

It appears that WBS in a very sad attempt to save bandwith are routing all requests to www.google.com to www.google.co.za instead. This isn't that much of a problem, except for the fact that mail.google.co.za does not exist.

Any attempt to try and access mail.google.com fails. I am hoping this is just me, but I fear otherwise.

Please could you try access GMail and post results in this thread.

P.S - I've pinged mail.google.com and it is up.

 

[rudids]

Hmmm,

Interesting. I'll have to check my local firewall and proxy server to see wether or not somebody has been fiddling around in there.

Anyways, thanks for your help guys. Greatly appreciated.

P.S - Apologies to WBS.

 

[MrH]

Must be your side as Gmail has been fine all day and tonight.

 

[ambo]

www.google.co.za is merely a CNAME for www.google.com

Just to correct you IC - google.co.za is not just a CNAME. google.co.za is a totally different site - hosted on a different server (hopefully on local turf). The google.com server detects that you are from SA and redirects you to the locally targetted site (Note the "pages from south africa" under the search box) The redirect is done through a server redirect command that tells the browser what to do through the http headers.
Google has set up localised sites for most of the big internet coutries... google.co.uk, etc, etc.

 

[TheSaint]

i have tried to get a gmail account but have had no luck i keep asking me to register a google account but there was no link

is there anyone who can help me to set one up or just point me in the rite direction please

 

[slimothy]

i thought that was google redirecting to google.co.za based on IP to country results, how does wbs redirecting traffic to google.co.za save them bandwidth?

 

[TheCynick]

i have tried to get a gmail account but have had no luck i keep asking me to register a google account but there was no link

is there anyone who can help me to set one up or just point me in the rite direction please

If you PM me your email addy I'll send you an invite

 

[ambo]

ambo, just to correct you, I said that www.google.co.za is a CNAME for www.google.com - note the www in front.

However I agree that g.co.za is a totally different site which is probably hosted locally, and while it appears to be a site to search for property, it does not appear to have anything to do with Google.

I do not have access to the innards of Google, but I can tell you, that http://google.co.za redirects to http://[B]www.google.co.za[/B], which is a CNAME for www.google.com, and obviously I know that the page at www.google.co.za targets South African users of Google, but it is still not locally hosted in SA.

I did a bit of research... Yes ok, so at DNS level google.co.za is CNAME'd to google.com but google has done a few things that kinda break the whole definition.
Firstly they running load balancing so each DNS request returns a different server address.
Second - the whole concept of CNAME's is a little pointless with the modern shared hosting sytems were 100's of domains can be CNAME'd to one server and actually have no relation to each other.
Buts its all really just technicalities... i'll leave it to the big G's techies to work out.

 

[nocilah]

google is run by terrorists.

 

[Raithlin]

Any attempt to try and access mail.google.com fails. I am hoping this is just me, but I fear otherwise.

Please could you try access GMail and post results in this thread.

P.S - I've pinged mail.google.com and it is up.

Funny, I've had the same results for the past 4 days. All my mail attempts fail, but http works. I thought it was as a result of being capped, but this morning still the same.

So, to recap: Gmail fails, pop3.wbs fails.

I don't get it. rudids, are you running FreeProxy, perhaps? (Just trying to find common ground...)

 

[mbs]

I've been getting this since about Sunday midday - anybody else?

Server Error

Gmail is temporarily unavailable. Cross your fingers and try again in a few minutes. We are sorry for the inconvenience.

 

[mbs]

*Bump*
Still having access problems for unknown reasons. Gets to the point where it appears to want to load up the login screen, but merely has a white display for a few seconds and then returns the server error message. Raithlin and rudids - any solutions for you? I've tried everything, including different DNS, with/without proxies, even a reinstall of an older version of Firefox. HELP!!!!!!!

 

[MrH]

Gmail has been fine here for me with no problems at all, and I can't remember when last I could not get to it and I use it all the time.

 

[mbs]

Well, I've now gone through using v1.07 of Firefox with no add-ins and a clean cache on a Windoze box, Konqueror and Firefox v1.0.2 on a Centos box and lynx on a Mandriva box, and I've got exactly the same problem. This is extremely frustrating - it times out and returns a '500 Server Error', apparently when trying to access the server at 'mail.google.com'. Anybody got any thoughts on this - could it perhaps be an ISP issue, (using Axxess)? I'm really at a loss here - even though it appears that the problem resides with Google itself, I'm more inclined to think that it's a consequence of some localised shenanigans. Some pointers would be appreciated...

 

[mbs]

Just another note: I've even used a dial-up connection, in an attempt to bypass the usual ADSL radius servers, all to no avail. ?????!!!!

 

[MrH]

Weird problem you seem to be having as it's still fine here and I'm using FireFox 1.07. also tried it with IE and no problems.

Maybe it's something to do with the area you are in or a telkom problem.

 

[Jerry]

Beware of Google

..and now for a conspiracy theory:

I came across the following link recently:

http://www.google-watch.org/gmail.html

The site describes some of Google's questionable policies and evasive answers when it comes to their stance on internet privacy. Also suspect are some of the people/companies who are associated with Google:

Matt Cutts, a software engineer at Google since January 2000, used to work for the National Security Agency.

Keyhole, the satellite imaging company that Google acquired in October 2004, was funded by the CIA.


And this quote from the Google CEO Eric Schmidt isn't all that reassuring:

"We are moving to a Google that knows more about you."


I have switched to the Clusty search engine: http://clusty.com/ as
it does not track internet searches. Scroogle is another search engine that does not track: http://www.scroogle.org/

 

[Raithlin]

*Bump*
Still having access problems for unknown reasons. Gets to the point where it appears to want to load up the login screen, but merely has a white display for a few seconds and then returns the server error message. Raithlin and rudids - any solutions for you? I've tried everything, including different DNS, with/without proxies, even a reinstall of an older version of Firefox. HELP!!!!!!!

My email came right. Turned out I had changed my local proxy IP without changing ThunderTweety's settings. My bad.

Web-based GMail is working fine too.

 

[mbs]

Seems as if the-powers-that-be are smiling on me again - my access to GMail has miraculously been restored. Whoever you are and whatever you did - thanx, but no thanx for probably having caused the problem in the first place...pffft