Second Half

Perhaps it's just a single server; perhaps it's all of them, but...the server(s) that respond to pop.gmail.com when using Google Mail via POP appear to have an expired certificate, preventing at least some (Apple Mail included) mail clients to fail when attempting to retrieve their mail.

I have posted a message on the Gmail Help Discussion Google group. Since my posting of a reply to someone else's report of the problem, the number of responses to the original post has hit 29 in about 3 minutes.

Beyond that, I'm not really sure what to do about this, other than to blog. As with most of the big players, it's hard to get a phone number or email address to provide feedback. Hopefully, someone at G is watching or someone AT G is having the same problem as the "rest of us".

Stay tuned...

[UPDATE]: After 50+ messages to the Gmail Help Discussion Group, "we all" seemed to locate the "contact us" link on the Gmail help page. It seems that the Gmail team got enough of these reports to respond to and appear to be working on the problem. After first receiving a canned response from Gmail support asking me to do a lot of canned follow-up and respond with details if those attempts were unsuccessful, I received a very brief email from the Gmail team, stating:

Hello,

Thanks for your report. We are aware of this problem, and our engineers are working diligently to find a solution.

We apologize for any inconvenience this issue may have caused.

Sincerely,

The Gmail Team

More to stay tuned for...

[UPDATE]: The problem appears to be fixed, as of 4:30pm EST. Less than 2 hours of outage. Not too bad.

[FINAL UPDATE]: The Gmail team wrote back once again to say...

Hello,

Thanks for your report. We apologize for any inconvenience you may have experienced. The issue you described should now be resolved. If you continue to experience difficulties, please respond to this message, and we'll investigate further.

Sincerely,

The Gmail Team

I'm impressed.