This morning, I couldn’t sign into one of my secondary Gmail accounts. Not the main account I use day to day, but a secondary one meant for collecting spam.

Saw this fatal error:

Reactions:
1. I’m amused by the usage of the word “temporary” in this use case — how do they define “temporary”? It is a bit optimistic.
2. I like the “Try Again” link — why not give the user the quickest way to try again?
3. I clicked on the “Show Detailed Technical Info” link and was expecting to see a huge stack trace of Java code, but only saw “Numeric Code: 93” — this is good, we don’t want to see computer code shown to the customer.
4. The page says copyright 2008 — which implies this page hasn’t been touched for four years.

Finally, my favorite part of this page was the classic Gmail logo in top left.The one where Gmail is written in the colorful Google logo font where the different letters have different colors and the ‘m’ is shown as a mail envelope.

I definitely was a fan of this logo. The new Gmail logo treatment is so boring. Instead of having the logo in the top left, there are two graphics: one of “Google” and one of “Gmail”. The one of “Gmail” is written in red and is nothing like the previous logo.