Google provides one of the best e-mail services in the world for free but sometimes things go wrong and you might see a scary message like this: "Gmail is temporarily unavailable. Cross your fingers and try again in a few minutes. We're sorry for the inconvenience."

The problem may not be with your computer. It may be a hardware problem somewhere in the Google server farm itself. Hitting refresh multiple times to make your problem stand out clearly in their error logs is useful but meanwhile here are some other suggestions.

Things to try while crossing your fingers:

• Click refresh
• Log off and back on
• Clear SSL state
• Clear the browser cache
• Clear the google cookie definitions
• Restart your browser
• Try a different browser
• Reboot
• Make some coffee
• Go for a walk outside
• Clean out that messy closet
• Write a snail-mail letter to your mother