Gmail is undoubtedly one of Google's most popular and widely used services today. Gmail is so popular that a lot of people maintain multiple Gmail ids for personal or work purposes. Google has now introduced a single, multiple account log-in page, which will make multiple sign-ins an easier affair. With the Account Chooser feature users can choose from a list of their accounts. This means that now users will be required to enter their login credentials less frequently.
Users will have to first enable the feature, and tick the 'Stay signed in' checkbox. Whenever a user wants to log in to a particular account, he or she will only need to click on the account in the list. The details included in the list for every account are the user's name, e-mail id, and a profile image, if any. Users can freely add or remove accounts clubbed under this feature. The "Edit account" option at the bottom of the list is used to remove an account. To delete an account, users need to sign out of it. Those who wish to discontinue using this feature can disable it.
It seems Gmail is down since a few days for some iOS and Android devices. A number of users are complaining of an IMAP error occuring when they try to access Gmail through their devices. According to reports, users are receiving a 'mail service imap.gmail.com is not responding' error message when trying to access their accounts via IMAP.
The cause of the problem is currently not clear, but Google has stated in an email to AllThingsD that it is looking into the problem and is working on rolling out a fix. Google also states on its support page under the ‘Pop, IMAP and Sync’ tab, “We are aware of an issue where users are receiving an error that "'imap.gmail.com' is not responding" when using IMAP on their computers, mobile devices, or tablets. We are currently working on resolving this issue”. It has also listed a couple of workarounds on the page. The workarounds include trying to access Gmail through a web browser or by installing the Gmail application for the various devices while the problem is being sorted out".
This is not the first time one of Google’s services has failed. The company’s popular chat and messenger service, Google Talk, suffered a worldwide outage late last month. Users trying to access the service were seeing error messages or experiencing unexpected behaviour. In the first message that Google posted after the outage, it confirmed that it was investigating the issue, and would provide more information soon. In a later update, Google added, "We're aware of a problem with Google Talk affecting a majority of users. The affected users are able to access Google Talk, but are seeing error messages and/ or other unexpected behavior. We will provide an update by 7/26/12 5:20 PM detailing when we expect to resolve the problem. Please note that this resolution time is an estimate and may change".