Gmail contextual gadget broken (again)

Question

Link to previous issue: Gmail contextual gadget broken

Yesterday we received a couple of customer complaints regarding our Gmail gadget. They claimed that it had gone missing from their account. This morning, several of our employees have reported the same although, this isn't happening for everyone.

We haven't made any changes to the gadget and since it loads for some, I don't think this was caused by us.

What happens:

• The window of the contextual gadget does not appear in the main Gmail interface
• The window of the contextual gadget does not appear when opening an email in a new window (shift + click). This differs from when this happened previously.

Answer 1

Here are the details of the response I received from Google for this issue

Thank you for contacting Google for Work Support. I understand that that you Gmail Contextual Gadgets have disappeared again from the Gmail web interface.

I notice there are other user reporting a similar behavior hence he have requested an update from our Eng team and I am currently waiting for their response. As soon as I have an official response, I will be contacting you back directly with the next steps.

Also I notice you mentioned that the previous workaround is no longer working. Previously the workaround provided was to press "Shift" and then click on the email. The email will be opened in a new window and then the gadgets should be displayed. Can you please confirm if the above workaround is working or not?

I’ll keep this case open while I wait for your reply. If you have any other questions or additional comments, don’t hesitate to reply and I'll be happy to continue helping you.

Sincerely,

Wilmer Google for Work Support

Here is the latest update from Google

As before this issue appears to be UI based as opposed to any problem with the Contextual Gadget API itself, we've gathered some troubleshooting information from affected test environments and are working on identifying a clear root cause and then remedying the behaviour at the moment.

There isn't any further you need to do on your end, I'll update you as I learn of any changes in the status of this behaviour.

Regards,

Patrick

Answer 2

We've also contacted Google and they have responded that they are looking into the issue. We've also seen that the shift-click to open an email in a new window doesn't work as a work around this time.

The last time this happened our monitoring showed that about 10% of users lost their access to the gadget per-day. We seeing a similar drop off in activity this time around.