Something is rotten in the state of Gmail. At least for some of us.

I thought it was maybe just me when I tweeted a couple days ago about awful Gmail performance recently. But it&'s not just me. Dozens of people responded to me about that tweet. I tweeted about it again earlier today and dozens of other people responded. Some quick Twitter searches reveals many others noticing the same thing: sometime in the past couple of weeks, something has happened that has made Gmail almost unbearably slow.

It seems to be particularly bad when I first start up Gmail in the morning. Then it often gets better. Then it gets worse again. A number of people I&'ve spoken with have noticed the exact same thing �a4���a4� including at least three of my colleagues here at TechCrunch. Opening an email can take upwards of 30 seconds to a minute. Sending one is even worse. And don&'t dare try to do an email search when Gmail is acting up.

I emailed Google about the problem two days ago. I thought perhaps they were doing maintenance and this was a side effect �a4���a4� or perhaps it was related to the awesome Priority Inbox feature. But they told me they weren&'t aware of any issue and would look into it. I haven&'t heard back.

Others, meanwhile, are reporting that service seems to be working fine. But again, I&'ve gotten too many responses from destinations all around the world to think this is isolated. At first I thought it might be just happening to people with massive inboxes (I&'m over 10 GB now used), but I&'ve spoken with a number of people who use a small amount of their storage and they&'re seeing the same thing.

The most troubling thing is that Google doesn&'t seem to know what is causing this. And it seem to be affecting both regular Gmail and Google Apps. That&'s not good when they&'re trying to do things like sue the government to get their software in the hands of federal employees.

I don&'t think there&'s any question that Gmail is the application I&'ve used the most over the past five years. Sure, every once in a while there have been performance issues, but never like this. It really does remind me of the old days of email on 9600 baud modems. It&'s getting to the point where I&'m about to switch back to using a native client and pulling my main via IMAP.

Hell, at these speeds, I&'m not even ruling out switching to a carrier pigeon.