Email Delivery Delay Using Gmail

I've had a Gmail account for around a year now, but have never used in much until recently. I have four different accounts for different purposes that I use regularly, and I had no need for another. With the new feature that allows you to send email from Gmail using headers from your other email accounts, Gmail started looking like an email consolidation solution for me. In addition, I can access it behind corporate firewalls that block other webmail services (maybe they just haven't caught on yet).

I started forwarding all of my email accounts to gmail. When I hit reply to those forwarded emails, they appear to be coming from the account they were sent to, even though they were received, composed and sent from Gmail.

Everything was moving along smoothly, until today. I was on deadline with a newspaper ad. I emailed the 1.3 MB PDF file as an attachment to three different people. Three times each. It took two hours or more for my client's to receive the files. Bad surprise. I sent the same file with Outlook and the client received it in a few minutes, as you would expect.

I guess that is the downside to using a Web based email service. The unexpected delays. I've had a hotmail account, and would have intermittent problems, so why should Gmail be any different? So be warned - using Gmail for business, especially in today's fast paced, demanding environment, may not be a good idea.