Excited! That’s the word for our progress with the Big Stability System… at a high level we’ve cracked a way to fix the most common problems without having to fully install a new version of ActiveInbox, which I hope will be ready to test in the next few days.

But in the mean time, there was an urgent need to sneak out an immediate update to some problems that you’ve been reporting. To introduce each of these foes, I’ll give them tedious sounding names:

The ‘Big Conversation’ Bear Trap

There have been a few threads on Get Satisfaction about how a conversation over 10 messages long can cause full CPU usage in Chrome for up to a minute; and in about 3 cases even led to being momentarily locked out of Gmail. This was obviously a super critical problem to research (we have successfully avoided any lock outs – a safety measure against intensive Gmail activity – for the last 3 years), even though I wasn’t at all certain what role AIB might be playing in it.

Well, it turns out there was a problem that affected conversations with many messages (especially if they contain images) and an existing status/deadline… they load so slowly that AIB thinks you’re receiving new messages and goes into over drive doing a little house keeping to stay on top of things.

Of course, it’s very wasteful to do that, so I’ve devised a test to make sure it can tell the difference between a slow (large) conversation load and an incoming reply; and it now only does the bare minimum it has to do: it’s a lot more efficient! I’m hoping all speed problems on loading a conversation are now gone.

The Morphing Shadowy Nature Of ‘Recent Labels’

Okay, that grandiose title somewhat overstates the reality! A little Gmail change meant that ActiveInbox couldn’t find the location of your labels in the sidebar, and threw its “Recent Label” toy out of the pram. This is now dealt with. (And this is exactly the kind of problem the new Big Stability System will instantly fix).

Notes Avoiding Their Duty

It was reported that Notes were not appearing when using the Preview Popup in the inbox or search results… and lo, it’s true! This was a quick & easy fix 🙂

You can grab 4.0.2.20 from http://www.activeinboxhq.com/install.php right now!

  

This was written by Andy Mitchell