Hi all,

If you’ve been having trouble with looping ‘Sign in with Google’, or with ActiveInbox not appearing, read on…

What have we been working on?

For the last 2 months, I’ve been working intensely on a big upgrade to how ActiveInbox connects to our server, and to Google’s server (basically taking our security to the next level, by minimising any interaction with our server, and maximising everything between your local computer and Google’s servers – including login, which is now affected).

What led to today’s downtime?

We’d been testing in Beta for the last few weeks, with 300 testers, but as we scaled that up to the a few 1000 in the last week, we uncovered bugs I’d not yet seen.

It’s always frustrating and anxiety inducing for both of us, and essentially I’m really sorry.

When will the fix be available?

I managed to fix 3/5 of the significant issues this morning before America woke up, mainly with the help of Casper in the Netherlands and Alex here in the UK, but two remaining issues need 7.2.18 to roll out to everyone before they’ll be properly resolved.

As ever, the roll out of an update to ActiveInbox can take anywhere between 12 and 72 hours.

What issues might I see?

Those issues:

  • A ‘Sign In With Google’ loop (it asks you to sign in, reloads, and asks again). Basically, I think I tightened the security bolt too tight, and ActiveInbox is rejecting itself in some cases. This will be 100% fixed in 7.2.18, but in the meantime, several users have had success by 1) signing in, 2) when it asks again, restarting Chrome, 3) opening Chrome and Gmail afresh, and signing in one last time.
  • The ‘ActiveInbox has locked down the server’ black bar. This is related to the previous issue, and seems to disappear with a refresh of Gmail, or reload of Chrome. It’ll be fixed properly in 7.2.18.
  • Sub Tasks are not appearing. This is a visual glitch – the data is safe – but as part of the security upgrade ActiveInbox now aggressively checks every bit of data it renders to be extra secure. Unfortunately, in this case it’s too aggressive, and is blocking all Sub Tasks. This will be fixed in 7.2.18.

I only scaled the affected release up to 20% of everyone who uses ActiveInbox, but if you’re affected I truly do apologise. I’m honestly not sure how I could have prevented it better, other than perhaps to try to see if more people would be willing to try being on the Beta release stream, but I’m trying to maximise the speed at which the fix gets rolled out.

What improvements can I expect?

When everything has calmed down, I’ll blog again to explain all the changes I’ve made over the last few months to give ActiveInbox a very secure core, and a new performance foundation from which to make future improvements.

Update on 16th August 2019

7.2.18 has successfully rolled out.

If you want to force it a along:

  • Go into Chrome Extensions (chrome://extensions)
  • Enable ‘Developer Mode’ in the top right
  • Click ‘Update’ in the top left
  • Refresh Gmail

A minor loading glitch remains where sometimes it won’t load (it’s a timing error, so fairly random), but it’s easily rectified by refreshing Gmail. And I’ll get an update out for it today.

If you encounter any other issues though, I’m still on red alert for any warnings, no matter how small, so don’t hesitate to contact support@activeinboxhq.com.

  

This was written by Andy Mitchell