After
my super-slow Gmail post was picked up
on HN and
on NYT, Google reached out to me. I gave them my username and 39hr later my account is back to normal.
I got approval from the person who communicated with me to share the following snippet of our conversation.
"The team is still looking into your account slowness, but it initially appears that the problem is isolated to a small subset of Gmail users...They are still investigating the root cause of the slowness but in the meantime have moved your account to a different set of servers, which should help."