I suggest to try contacting Google support staff and see what they say.

Not got an answer I’m afraid, but I’m experimenting with the new service from APM Internet at messagebunker.com – seems very good so far, and I’ve always been pleased with their other services. Not meant as spam – I have no connection with them other than a satisfied customer

@James – I believe Mala did, but to no avail.

@Steve – looks interesting. Do they work with Gmail? And I presume you trust them with your password?

I had faced this issue while using Firefox 3.1 Beta 2. I think it had something to do with how cookies were handled. I was able to get past the problem by cleaning out the cookies. Luckily, I have not faced this problem since I upgraded to Beta 3. I genuinely feel this was FF problem than google.

Trying other browsers (IE if you are on windows, or Opera, Safari) should definitely help with this problem.

Instead of POP3, one can also use IMAP (in case you do not want to download everything to local machine) with Gmail

MessageBunker sure looks interesting. Anyone who has user experience? Giving your account details to a 3rd party definitely *is* an issue, too..

yes, and yes

if using with gmail you need to select SSL and port 993, and have IMAP enabled in gmail

We had the same problem Tuesday with Internet Explorer but it was solved using Firefox (an earlier version, not the beta)

I had this happen with a google service (can’t remember which one) and the issue was I was locked out. It did the exact same thing, no message about being locked etc. I found a message on the web that sent me to the unlock page and it worked. Hope it helps:

https://www.google.com/accounts/DisplayUnlockCaptcha

Dax

I have seen something like this in the past, especially when accessing from mobile devices. I think once I had put in my password and entered this loop, the trick was to actually go back to the gmail link (e.g. mail.google.com). HTH

before sky is falling alarms, it should be confirmed this behavior exists on different browsers and computers. clear cache and cookies etc..

I think you should try to login without google lab. – http://mail.google.com/mail/?labs=0

here more details:

http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=29418&cbid=kxu61i8p0ma9&src=cb&lev=answer

If you’re having trouble I think it’s always worth trying to log in with Labs disabled – I have had something similar happen to me lately.

Append ?labs=0 to your login URL when logging in. If you can log in, then it’s a case of turning labs features on one by one until you find the one that breaks Gmail for you!

I’m using the Firefox add-on Stealther
and if I switch it on, get the same result.

So I think it might be related to cookies,
but I have not investigated more as switching Stealther off
allows me to log in again.

Had the same issue. Logout of Google from the igoogle page or any other page where it considers you logged in. Empty the cache. Login again. Worked like a charm for me.

I think that, by far, the easiest, most reliable and most secure means of backing up GMail is to get a Yahoo! email account and have it use POP to pull your your GMail emails with “leave messages on server” set to true.

This will give you a highly accessible backup. One that is never more than a few minutes out-of-date, can be reached from anywhere in the world, and is likely as secure as GMail.

I have had very similar issues on some random occasions. I run FF3.0.8 and have seen the double login.

Cleaned cookies and did not go away. Went home and opened up my GMail account using the same browser config on a different PC and bingo opened first time.

Yesterday I moved to Chrome as FF was opening and dealing with Gmail very slowly. With Chrome it flew. This morning the same issue.

Not sure if this got resolved, and I assume you have already tried this, but: I saw exactly this behavior in (ironically) Chrome, but found when I tried with other browsers (in my case, Firefox) it worked fine.

So I would try that if she hasn’t already – from a different browser, or even a different machine.

@Mandar Vaze
I had this problem once with Firefox, deleted the google cookies and it was solved… Tools/Options/Privaycy, show cookies and delete any *google* … I have no more ideas

Have you tried accessing google from another browser – if you can get there from explorer or chrome its obviously a firefox problem.
I had a whole pile of cookie related problems with firefox which i solved by deleting the cookies sqlite file from the profiles folder. It had obviously got corrupted. (well better to move it somewhere else as a backup).
As soon as you go on another site that needs cookies it is created again – and starts from fresh
worth giving it a try – i do think firefox stil suffers from occasional cookie indigestion!

seems to me like a bug in some extension or maybe superflous cookies. time to try the chrome/explorer/opera spare browser you have laying around and see if this persists.

this is not as bad as people waking up to see their inbox empty (there have been reports) and of course an account that completely disappears is not fun either.

the bottom line is, start considering a move to a different account, at a company that actually answers support calls. there are no free meals

I’ve started looking for Gmail alternatives, the problem is that the interface and the tag-based management are addictive, and leaving GTDInbox is making this even harder.

I wish there was a GTD extension for TB as useful as this one…

Different browsers and different operating systems were tried as well? Have you tried accessing it from a linux box? This shouldn’t be too hard to debug.

If you set your ethernet card on promiscuous and stick a sniffer like ethereal to monitor/log every packet sent and received after pressing ‘submit’ that travels to and from the gmail site from the ethernet card then you can log all the tcp handshakes and determine precisely what packets you do receive in return after conducting a html forms POST action. Compare that log with a log you make of a login attempt using an account you know that works. What types of errors in the logs? What type of packets are you seeing?

Are you familiar with the OSI model, the paragon upon which the Internet was built? If so, this is just a case of you needing to isolate what layer and on whose side the error is originating from. This can be determined by reviewing these logs. Just because the browser doesn’t do anything but redirect her to the same page doesn’t mean there aren’t interesting log messages somewhere that would make sense of it all. As soon as you press the submit button, a connection with the site is established and that entire ‘conversation’ that occurs between the browser to google’s servers can be listened to and read like a book.

Moreover, it doesn’t ‘sound’ like Google’s problem since this is completely unique to her account. Her account could have been hacked, using an automated man in the middle attack via botnet or a number of other sources. Have you tried accessing the account as a gmail drive using the gmailfs protocol?

I had this problem and fixed it. It was because of a cookie problem. I looked it up in a user forum somewhere (sorry–I’m not on the computer I fixed this on, so the details will be slightly fix), which said it was because I had had the “remember me on this computer” box checked and that whichever browser I was using had a cookie malfunction. It recommended freeware program called C-Cleaner (or some punctuation variation of that–stands for Crap Cleaner). I went to either their site or download.com, don’t remember which, ran it, and viola! It was fixed, never to return. Good luck! (I have no personal gain from mentioning C-Cleaner–it just worked for me).

I’ve faced this exact same problem before – changing browsers only solved the problem temporarily. T

urns out all I had to do was change my password to a “stronger” one as I had by-passed this requirement when signing up for one of google’s many services.