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The sneaky limits of Gmail and how it affected our application

Wednesday, April 29th, 2009 by James

So we got featured on LifeHacker today, giving us a sudden surge of users. As we opened up the beta program around two weeks ago (with intentionally low fan-fare) we now have a massive number of new users. Welcome to you all!

One thing that sprung forth was one big hole in our existing production stack – which were relatively quickly fixed, however the VPS solution is definitely now showing its weak points. Pleased to say however that we are about to move to dedicated hardware with our movement out of beta and into full-release mode (occurring within the next 4 or so days), which from our tests is going to blow the current speeds out of the water.

The one thing we weren’t expecting is that no emails have been sent since 10:04am this morning. It transpires that Gmail doesn’t allow anymore mail to be sent from an account past the 500 mark (http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=22839). Thats a lot of users without activation emails.

So we are currently working on solutions to the mail problem for an ongoing basis for circumstances where the app needs to send thousands of emails in a day.

We do have a solution for the missing activation emails however – we will be getting these out to everyone who is owed one within the next 16 hours. However you can still log into PocketSmith for 24 hours after you have created your account without activating your email address!

Again, welcome to our new users, and thank you for putting the app and the server through its paces!

6 Responses to “The sneaky limits of Gmail and how it affected our application”

  1. KORHAL says:

    Thank you for the welcome James. It was good to hear from you directly on Lifehacker :) I hope the warm fuzzies I spoke about with PocketSmith get better and better in the coming days with it leaving Beta. I hope the Gmail fix comes along easily for the team! <3

  2. James says:

    No problems Korhal – it has certainly brought a few bugs to light, particularly with the uploading of CSVs and the different formats around the world. However the most important thing is that people find the app useful in managing their money – and know things are getting slicker, more refined and more bug-free very quickly with the influx of eyeballs!

    Thanks again, hope you continue to enjoy using the app :)

  3. new user says:

    Is there a public bug repository? (I keep -losing- random calendar entries, for example I’ve had to enter my payday information at least 4 separate times on the forecast calendar because it is simply gone. Unfortunately, I haven’t found any pattern of which entry/ies are disappearing or any pattern of when/why they disappear. It’d be nice to be able to see if anybody else is having similar issues, and if so, (a) what triggers it, (b) if there is anything I can do to avoid triggering it, and (c) if/when you are planning to address it. FYI: if it weren’t for this annoying bug, I think I’d really, really like PocketSmith.)

  4. Jason says:

    We’re trialing UserVoice and will have this up and running when we launch. Sorry to hear that you’re encountering this recurring bug, we’ve -never- come across this before! Unless you’re not Devar, in which case you’re the second person to report this tonight.

    We’d like to work with you to stomp this, please email us at contact@pocketsmith.com with a few more details, e.g. user agent, the text you’re putting in to the event and configuration, etc etc. :-)

  5. James says:

    Hi there,

    We have tracked down and squashed the source of this bug – your events will now stick around forever!

    Thanks for reporting this, hope that you continue to use the application, despite the frustration with the disappearing events!

    Thanks :)
    James

  6. yeh says:

    hi, i was new to pocket smith… found it really useful for me to manage my budget :)
    but one thing i found it somehow summarize wrong value….

    for example i have 2 calender, A and B
    every month my income will be in A, says 3000
    then i transfer money from A to B, says 2000 (it will end up expense 2000 in A, and income 2000 in B)

    so in the end, the summary will shown
    income == 5000
    expenses == 2000

    apart from that, it is look excellent for me :)

    thanks

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