So, you’ve heading into Gmail to check your mail in your Google Mail account and you’ve been hit by “Temporary Error (500)” which reads:

“We’re sorry, but your Gmail account is temporarily unavailable. We apologise for the inconvenience and suggest trying again in a few minutes.”

You click on the link for “Detailed Technical Info” and it says “Numeric Code: 151” – so what does all this technology talk mean and what has happened? You may have tried the news groups, blogs, and even the Gmail trouble-shooter (the one which walks through a number of multiple choice scenarios) but other than some generic advice it doesn’t really help.

For the most part you can do exactly what it says and just wait a few minutes but if, like me, you like to know what things mean and why they happen here is the low down.

The 500 range of messages appear when Gmail tries to sign-in and as Google say “it means that Gmail is temporarily unavailable.” – pretty vague but there is a reason for it. This message comes from the particular server you are connected to, at that particular point in time, and indicates the server is experiencing an internal issue – this could be the server that serves up the content or it could be one of the directory servers that holds or authenticates your account details.

Google use many servers for hosting services and they are usually assigned on load balanced service which means retrying a few minutes later will more than likely connect you to a different group of servers and the problem will appear to have gone away (the engineers will also be looking at the particular server in question and fixing it in parallel).

Gmail Issue Updates

Check back to this article regularly for more updates.

UPDATE: One recommendation is to clear your browser cache. Personally, I don’t see this being a particularly helpful solution, as the 500 error is usually associated with the server, but it may help to keep you busy for a minute or two whilst the load balancers work on routing round the faulty server.

UPDATE 10th December 2012: Sure enough, . IT news press have also identified that 502 error message as relating to proxy servers (the servers that sit between web browser requests and the Gmail servers themselves).