Dear Reader,
Around mid-morning today, I flicked over to my Google Mail to check my inbox and was surprised to find the layout was all skewiff.
The left column, which contains all the inbox, sent mail, drafts et al. links filled up half the page, which meant the "message section" could only be displayed on the other 50%. As I have a small screen on my netbook anyway, GMail was quite unusable.
'Just a temporary glitch', I though so, because my inbox was empty, I continued with what I was doing. A little later, I went back to find my GoogleMail was still behaving inappropriately.
I found that if I downgraded by clicking the 'older version' link at the op of the page, Google Mail was fixed, but unfortunately my WiseStamp widget, which I rely on to automatically insert my signature no longer functioned.
I cleared my browser cache, restarted FireFox and restarted my computer all to no avail. What was this mysterious problem that had afflicted my GMail? Why had my left-hand column got so big?
After a little experimentation I discovered that the culprit was "offline files". This is is a Google Labs feature that I'm using so it's still in the testing phase. Basically, it caches my mailbox on my computer so I can access my emails and create drafts when I don't have an Internet connection.
This was confirmed over at Google Apps Support and Google have advised that they are looking into the problem and hope to have it fixed soon.
In the meantime, I have disabled Google Labs features using the url:
http://mail.google.com/a/shoredutton.com/?labs=0
NOTE: If you need to do this for your domain, don't forget to change the shoredutton.com part of he URL for your own domain name :)
Until next time,
Daniel
