8 ms·

Gmail AI gets more intrusive

260 points by speckx 1y ago

verdverm 1y ago
100% Google has been making their AI more intrusive and in your face across all their portfolio. It's not just Google, Atlassian is doing the same With search in gcloud, the drop-down top 2/3 is ai calls to action. Completely useless because their suggestions are so bad and for such basic tasks that I never do. It feels like in platform advertising. I've left them feedback, and since they've only doubled down, am now reducing my spend Moving to Cloudflare, if you're curious
- dangoor 1y ago
  Cloudflare has a gmail competitor?
  - Hammershaft 1y ago
    IDK about Cloudflare but Fastmail is excellent.
  - NewJazz 1y ago
    Not really 1:1 but I did find this https://www.cloudflare.com/developer-platform/products/email-routing/ https://www.cloudflare.com/developer-platform/products/email...
    - verdverm 1y ago
      that is very interesting for another thing I have in mind, thanks for the share!
  - verdverm 1y ago
    No, mainly focused on my cloud infra right now. Finding an alt to gmail+gsuite is something I'd like to do if there were reasonable options, but that involves non tech people also being open to that option
- bamboozled 1y ago
  I hate the “AI mode”
IncreasePosts 1y ago
Did the user accidentally keep hitting Alt+H? Or are they part of some experiment? Gmail writes nothing for me unless I click the "help me write" link. I also don't know why it is so hard to record a screenshot of the behavior, you can write it to example@example.com, and the draft email UI can be clipped from where it shows your email address.
- spankalee 1y ago
  Yeah, I don't know what he's talking about. I see obviously AI-powered tab-completion suggestions, and the Alt-H prompt suggestion when first writing an email, but I've never had it actually insert text unprompted.
- gs17 1y ago
  > Gmail writes nothing for me unless I click the "help me write" link. For me it sometimes (I'm not sure why, it isn't even "intelligent" about which emails have options, automatic noreply@ emails sometimes have it) has buttons to pre-fill a reply with a message out of a few choices. It's not unprompted, but I could see someone accidentally clicking it instead of the reply button.
merelysounds 1y ago
Anecdotally, I don’t see any of this. I have all “smart” features in gmail turned off; there is an option like this in the settings. Google’s Help: https://support.google.com/mail/answer/15604322 https://support.google.com/mail/answer/15604322 Also relevant: > By default, smart feature settings are off if you live in: The European Economic Area, Japan, Switzerland, United Kingdom
- jeffbee 1y ago
  [flagged]
- protoster 1y ago
  This is often the case with Google products because the A/B testing is rampant.
- kyrra 1y ago
  This. You can disable all smart features (which includes things like mail categories, AI auto-complete, and most things that look at your emails). Gear -> All Settings -> General tab (default) -> Smart features: Turn on smart features in Gmail, Chat, and Meet Linked help page: https://support.google.com/mail/answer/15604322 https://support.google.com/mail/answer/15604322
  - mrweasel 1y ago
    How many would turn them on if they defaulted to "Off"? Probably not enough to justify the development cost.
    - kvirani 1y ago
      True but that is a function of ignorance too. There are plenty of good features in Gmail that are off by default, like undo / delayed send and keyboard shortcuts.
      - mrweasel 1y ago
        "Enable delay send - Allows you to undo sending emails for 5 minutes", I'd argue that a lot of people would enable that pretty fast. Keyboard shortcuts probably would work like I'd expect, people like me would go "Hell no, no keyboard shortcuts in browser application EVER", and power users would opt into that in an instant.
charlieyu1 1y ago
A client emailed me for a meeting at Monday 2pm. The Gmail AI immediately marked Monday 2am on my calendar and it cannot even be deleted.
- pinkmuffinere 1y ago
  Wow i really hope this is a mistake, that sounds like a severe bug
  - mort96 1y ago
    Well it's not a "bug". Language models make mistakes; it's a fundamental part of how they function.
    - spankalee 1y ago
      This isn't LLMs. Gmail has been creating calendar events from emails for a long time. The bug would be if the user can't delete the event.
      - OJFord 1y ago
        What makes you think it hasn't long been using a large language model for it though? Maybe not Large Language Model, the term seems to have come with ChatGPT et al., but Google's been doing machine learning for a long long time; the transformer architecture paper (kind of the groundwork for the current wave) was published by a Google team in 2017. A lot of new Google features are branded 'AI', because it's so hyped it has broad consumer awareness, but a lot of Google features for a long time have used AI and just been brandless or at least 'AI'-less features.
      - birdman3131 1y ago
        It started about a month ago for me. I am subscribed to emails from an IT as a Gig platform called Field Nation. Thought I might pickup a bit of side work but never did. Recently it started adding them to my calendar and there is no way to turn off this feature without also turning off useful features such as package out for delivery notifications.
NelsonMinar 1y ago
Could use a more reliable source for this report. I paid for and tried Google AI for Gmail and was appalled at how bad it is. The product team there is really not executing well. I've switched now to Shortwave. It works very well and having LLM+RAG queries for 20+ years of email archives has been very helpful to me.
cpursley 1y ago
I’ve found the email thread summary pretty useful ymmv.
pflenker 1y ago
Tangentially related, the AI integrated in Google Chat is hilariously bad. Find a thread which starts with „Bug: (…)“ that has 90+ answers. Hey, an AI could be useful here! Click summarize. Wait. Without fail the result will be along the lines of „X, Y and Z discuss a bug.“
- londons_explore 1y ago
  It would be fine if you could then reply with 'no, please tell me about the nature of the bug not the people involved', and then have it remember that forever. However nearly nobody seems to correctly implement this user-wide memory.
renewiltord 1y ago
Yeah, you gotta watch out for this stuff. The other day I was using Gmail when it just gave me a million dollars. I gave it to charity under an assumed name. Can’t screenshot without revealing the name but I think it’s actually super cool of Google to do this. Just distributed charity. With no benefit to themselves. They did say that they did it based on my Google Photos showing that I was really good looking (can’t share because of privacy) so there’s some privacy stuff there but overall I think it’s good.
shortrounddev2 1y ago
I moved to ProtonMail right before their CEO started mouthing off about his dipshit opinions. I still use them because it's cheaper to pay for a family plan and get a VPN, password manager, and storage along with the email. I used to pay for each of these services individually and was paying 2x what I pay now
- renewiltord 1y ago
  ProtonMail also does this. Someone actually told me they got an email from me and when I checked it said “this mail was AI generated”. I can’t screenshot it though. Personal reasons.
- barbazoo 1y ago
  > I used to pay for each of these services individually and was paying 2x what I pay now What's the other factor though and is it worth the getting walled in? Password manager in my opinion has to be its own thing, has nothing to do with the rest, same for VPN. I can see email, calendar and data being close together as being beneficial in every day flow. That's where Fastmail for instance draws the line I think. If you untangle these, would the cost not be worth the benefit?
doctorpangloss 1y ago
ha ha, hey google PMs, here's a useful AI feature: > Is this e-mail marketing something?
- QuercusMax 1y ago
  I recently noticed that some of the emails in my gmail "promotions" inbox aren't emails at all, and are actually undeletable ads from Google.
  - roryirvine 1y ago
    If you're willing to use the web ui rather than the native app, then uBlock Origin will successfully remove those ads. Otherwise, you could always just switch the "promotions" tab off - the contents will show up in your main inbox, but without the ads.
azhenley 1y ago
This is why I am building a better AI for my inbox.
psygn89 1y ago
Can it can help answer my questions on behalf of my clients that use gmail?
apparent 1y ago
And yet google's spam filters still let through so much AI slop spam. Any email from a new sender should be suspect, and if it has an awkwardly phrased opt-out line ("if you'd rather not hear from me again, just shoot me a "leave out"") then it should presumptively be marked as spam.
- jeffbee 1y ago
  Spam classification has virtually zero to do with the contents of the message.
  - apparent 1y ago
    I have the gmail app set to only notify me for "important messages," and it pretty reliably doesn't trigger a notification for this junk. I wish I could have it use that system (whatever it's using) to actually flag messages as spam/mass emails. If it's a seemingly personal message from an unknown sender, send it to spam. If it looks like a mass email (that someone might have signed up for), then put it in the Commercial tab or whatever it's called, so I can set up a filter for it or unsubscribe.
    - jeffbee 1y ago
      I think letting your email app raise notifications is a mistake, and I can see how letting it do that would amplify the annoyance of any misclassified messages.
      - apparent 1y ago
        Until about 9 months ago it was not an issue. I'm glad the gmail app has the "important only" feature, but just wish it was given more power so that when I'm at my computer they are properly categorized there as well.
notatoad 1y ago
am i missing something here, or is this really just a random two-sentence gripe from some guy, complaining about something that nobody else can reproduce? "dave is mad at gmail". okay dave.
- reaperducer 1y ago
  am i missing something here, or is this really just a random two-sentence gripe from some random guy, complaining about something that nobody else can reproduce? You have just summarized HN, and most of social media and the blogosphere, in 2025. The internet is 44% angry people getting off on being angry about nothing.
  - notatoad 1y ago
    i feel like HN is usually at least a little bit better than this. the comments are often full of silly gripes, but they don't usually get voted up to the top of the homepage and stay there for hours
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
uptown 1y ago
GMail started inserting package delivery notifications at the top of my inbox screen. Not exactly ideal for Christmas shopping with family milling about. If you turn it off, you lose the tabs for email categorization, so instead I wrote a CSS rule to hide it permanently, but it's a bad feature.
- jeffbee 1y ago
  Not sure what you mean here. You can disable package status and still keep tabbed inbox.
einpoklum 1y ago
Please do yourself and the world a measure of good, and stop using GMail. Giving someone a GMail address is like saying "Yes, I like to be abused, I like to be violated and have no privacy". It is quite embarrassing - and people who are tech-savvy should be telling their colleagues and peers that it is embarrassing and inappropriate. Yes, I realize that dropping the GMail mailbox does not mean you are free from GMail, because of all of the other people on it. But we must each make some effort to chip away at that thing. Twenty years ago, when Microsoft's hold on PCs was much stronger than it is today, online venues were inundated with derision and denouncement of them and their practices; but these days - it's as though Alphabet/Google control of all these aspects of so many people's lives is just neutral reality, ho-hum, nothing to waste time thinking about.
hilbert42 1y ago
I'm truly thankful I deleted my Gmail account years ago and my smartphone has no account and no g-apps. Do we have to riot in the streets before governments regulate this shit?
- nichos 1y ago
  Why regulate it? You don't have to use it (as you clearly moved elsewhere). Out of curiosity, where did you move to?
  - hilbert42 1y ago
    "Why regulate it?" That doesn't require an answer—both sides of the fence already well know the reasons and they're diametrically opposite. I didn't move anywhere, what gave you the impression I did?
    - nichos 1y ago
      You said you deleted your Gmail, I'm assuming you moved to another service.
      - hilbert42 1y ago
        I had multiple services before Gmail was even conceived as I do now. I've had several Gmail accounts, the first was in the early days when one had to be introduced by an existing member (Gmail address) before one could join—a colleague sponsored me. The others were 'anonymous' accounts for testing email crested somewhat later after Google had realized that cliquey club memberships made no money.
Animats 1y ago
You have to wonder what Gmail reports about you. Does it detect suicidal thoughts? Child sexual abuse? Antifa activity?
spankalee 1y ago
I've never flagged a submission before, but I just have to with this one. There's no evidence, no blurred-out screen shot even, no one here has seen this behavior in the comments, and I can't find any corroborating reports on the web. Who knows what's really happening or not here?
- andy99 1y ago
  Anyone remember the news story about Metallica copyrighting G and F chords? It’s sort of like that, true or not it’s so on brand that people just accept it, it doesn’t tell you something you did already know about how google (or Metallica) behave. https://www.metalunderground.com/news/details.cfm?newsid=5752 https://www.metalunderground.com/news/details.cfm?newsid=575...
  - Permit 1y ago
    https://www.smbc-comics.com/comics/1505312920-20170913%20(1).png https://www.smbc-comics.com/comics/1505312920-20170913%20(1)...
    - andy99 1y ago
      I don’t get it
    - raincole 1y ago
      Perfect response lol. Rare to see it's not xkcd.
    - Karrot_Kream 1y ago
      Isn't this HN in a nutshell these days?
      - 0manrho 1y ago
        The internet at large really.
- brazukadev 1y ago
jimt1234 1y ago
Where I work, we get tons of feedback from customers, basically saying, "How do I disable this new AI feature? I never asked for this." Yet, the guidance from leadership is very clear: "More AI!" I suspect it's like this at Google (and everywhere else), too.
glerk 1y ago
Google must have some awful PMs and designers. The worst UX decision I have seen recently is AI auto-dubbing all youtube videos by default with no way to disable this behavior globally. How could you miss that people can be fluent in multiple languages and if I click on a video in a foreign language, I most likely want the original soundtrack? Clearly, the intention was to boost some metric “X users are using this feature” with no regard for the actual user.
- jack_pp 1y ago
  +1, this is the most annoying YouTube feature I've ever come across. Gave them feedback on it.. maybe more people should complain
  - jimmyl02 1y ago
    if it increases topline metrics like watch time it's probably hard for them to justify removing it. a change this big seems like it was probably a/b tested and did move metrics significantly?
    - cedilla 1y ago
      Probably. We keep watching all kind of stuff after getting baited into it. AI slob is annoying, but we do want to know what chefs do about sticky pizza dough, or what that secret in the pyramids is, or how the kid reacted to what the cat did, or (insert your guilty pleasure here).
      - xp84 1y ago
        on some platforms I try to be really good about hitting the "Never recommend this channel/page/whatever again" whenever the algo serves me the bottom-tier gutter trash videos, such as the "idiotic life hack that obviously won't work" engagement bait. It's a small drop in the ocean, but at least that one channel will never be served to me again.
- MetaMalone 1y ago
estebarb 1y ago
Something I noticed recently is that titles of youtube videos are automatically translated. I'm convinced that nobody in Google speaks more than one language, otherwise they would have never done that. It is impossible to turn off the unsolicited translations in search, and now youtube. I'm scared that soon they will force up audio translation as well.
- machomaster 1y ago
  It's not only the titles, but the descriptions as well. And viewers can't turn this behavior off, only the channel creator can and most will not.
randerson 1y ago
I've been a long-time Gmail user with a paid plan. But recently two issues are annoying me enough that I'm considering leaving: 1. The incessant "Using Gmail to run your business?" upsells. No, I'm unemployed and this is a personal account. Unlike the AI upsell, I can't seem to dismiss this permanently. It just snoozes it until the next time I open it. 2. The Search bar has become dangerously glitchy (at least in Firefox for Mac) if you type fast and have keyboard shortcuts on. It lets me type 1 or 2 characters before it starts treating every character as a shortcut, inadvertently deleting, muting, archiving emails. Search is what sets Gmail apart and now it is unusable. I reported this bug to Google months ago and my patience is running thin.
- thunderbong 1y ago
  I've always found the Gmail search bar glitchy on Firefox but never on Chrome browsers. I'll be typing something in the search box and suddenly I'll end up navigating somewhere with the keyboard focus having gotten removed from there.
MinimalAction 1y ago
I can see how it is useful: for some people, reading and writing emails is a dreadful activity. But it is also an important facet of every human activity -- communication. So, it better be intentional and clear. I have turned off all smart features and let me handle how to say what I want to say.
- troyvit 1y ago
  Man I was in a Google News Initiative meeting and they started with a "fun poll" where they asked how you'd feel if you read an email that you knew was written by AI. Lots of people didn't mind knowing that was the case, and it was mainly for the reasons you put out writing emails is legit not fun for a lot of people. Man I was so triggered though, like old-man-yelling-at-clouds level. Then I went back through gmail and exactly one of the last 50 most recent emails I've received was not an alert or a newsletter or an invite. IOW out of my last 50 emails only one of them would've fit the bill for an AI-written correspondence taking the place of a human-written one. All that butt-hurt and it doesn't even matter. So long way of getting around to saying that your point about intentionality and clarity is clutch, and if people can get that with AI-written emails maybe I can cool my jets.
butz 1y ago
Is there a way to suspend/disable Gmail account in a way, that no bad actors could overtake it, after Google disables/deletes(?) it after period of two years?
david_van_loon 1y ago
I've seen no indications of this supposed feature in my own experience or other sources. The article does not provide any evidence to support its claims.
phyzome 1y ago
...I'm confused, is there something I'm missing in this post? I only see 4 sentences, with almost no information.
havaloc 1y ago
One of my tech clients emailed me about a Roku problem and one of the AI suggestions in Gmail was to tell the customer to try unplugging a Roku for a minute and plugging it back in. I pressed that button, proofread the suggested text, and hit send. In truth it felt both amazing and made me uneasy, for AI was encroaching on my career of telling people to reboot their errant device.
isaachinman 1y ago
For anyone looking for a cross-platform, local-first IMAP email client that "just works" and doesn't jam AI down your throat, check us out: https://marcoapp.io https://marcoapp.io
- stOneskull 1y ago
  i do about 95% of my emailing in thunderbird on my computer, and 5% in the gmail app on my phone or on the specific email's website. all imap so they're basically synced already. i'm wondering if your marco app will be useful for my use case, and what the benefits would be. i think i would lose some benefits such as thunderbird extensions. also, to use proton mail on my phone i think i need the protonmail app. i use the proton bridge to use it in thunderbird. would the marco app work with proton on computer but not on phone?
testdelacc1 1y ago
All this AI is great. What I really want is to clean up my inbox by seeing where the mails are coming from. What I want is `select sender, count(*) from emails group by 1 order by 2 desc` or the equivalent. But I guess that doesn’t juice the stock price like AI does.
- pseufaux 1y ago
  Unrelated, but if you have an iPhone, I use Chuck for this. The free tier is plenty if you just want to use it to clean up the inbox. https://chuck.email https://chuck.email
- DANmode 1y ago
  Gmail can “Filter Messages Like This”, in a number of algorithmic ways, when a message row is selected.
sodapopcan 1y ago
Stop using Google products.
alex1138 1y ago
Do one thing and do it well, you assholes Be dumb pipes Google has already arguably ruined Youtube, which they own, over a period of many, many years It doesn't matter if the community does all the work, the company will MITM themselves to make themselves look more important than they are
raincole 1y ago
I'll save you a click: > Gmail doesn't just offer to write your emails for you, they actually do it, and it's up to you to delete the text it wrote. > Hard to make a screen shot to demo without revealing personal info. That's how awful this thing is. > It reeks of desperation. This is the whole article. That's it. No screenshot. No details. Nothing. Just three random sentences. 200+ upvote on HN btw.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
SanjayMehta 1y ago
Most of the time I'm on IMAP for gmail et al, so I haven't seen this yet. How long before some Google PM decided to turn off IMAP access?
cat-whisperer 1y ago
I agree, but on the same level. The interface of email client and sheets client is so intuitive. It should be a interesting engineering problem to implement AI for these tools. spreadsheet truly is a universal interface for number crunching, and not being able to use AI inside sheets is a bummer.

260 points by speckx 1y ago

100% Google has been making their AI more intrusive and in your face across all their portfolio. It's not just Google, Atlassian is doing the same With search in gcloud, the drop-down top 2/3 is ai calls to action. Completely useless because their suggestions are so bad and for such basic tasks that I never do. It feels like in platform advertising. I've left them feedback, and since they've only doubled down, am now reducing my spend Moving to Cloudflare, if you're curious

dangoor 1y ago
Cloudflare has a gmail competitor?
- Hammershaft 1y ago
  IDK about Cloudflare but Fastmail is excellent.
- NewJazz 1y ago
  Not really 1:1 but I did find this https://www.cloudflare.com/developer-platform/products/email-routing/ https://www.cloudflare.com/developer-platform/products/email...
  - verdverm 1y ago
    that is very interesting for another thing I have in mind, thanks for the share!
- verdverm 1y ago
  No, mainly focused on my cloud infra right now. Finding an alt to gmail+gsuite is something I'd like to do if there were reasonable options, but that involves non tech people also being open to that option
bamboozled 1y ago
I hate the “AI mode”

IncreasePosts 1y ago

Did the user accidentally keep hitting Alt+H? Or are they part of some experiment? Gmail writes nothing for me unless I click the "help me write" link. I also don't know why it is so hard to record a screenshot of the behavior, you can write it to example@example.com, and the draft email UI can be clipped from where it shows your email address.

spankalee 1y ago
Yeah, I don't know what he's talking about. I see obviously AI-powered tab-completion suggestions, and the Alt-H prompt suggestion when first writing an email, but I've never had it actually insert text unprompted.
gs17 1y ago
> Gmail writes nothing for me unless I click the "help me write" link. For me it sometimes (I'm not sure why, it isn't even "intelligent" about which emails have options, automatic noreply@ emails sometimes have it) has buttons to pre-fill a reply with a message out of a few choices. It's not unprompted, but I could see someone accidentally clicking it instead of the reply button.

merelysounds 1y ago

Anecdotally, I don’t see any of this. I have all “smart” features in gmail turned off; there is an option like this in the settings. Google’s Help: https://support.google.com/mail/answer/15604322 https://support.google.com/mail/answer/15604322 Also relevant: > By default, smart feature settings are off if you live in: The European Economic Area, Japan, Switzerland, United Kingdom

jeffbee 1y ago
[flagged]
protoster 1y ago
This is often the case with Google products because the A/B testing is rampant.
kyrra 1y ago
This. You can disable all smart features (which includes things like mail categories, AI auto-complete, and most things that look at your emails). Gear -> All Settings -> General tab (default) -> Smart features: Turn on smart features in Gmail, Chat, and Meet Linked help page: https://support.google.com/mail/answer/15604322 https://support.google.com/mail/answer/15604322
- mrweasel 1y ago
  How many would turn them on if they defaulted to "Off"? Probably not enough to justify the development cost.
  - kvirani 1y ago
    True but that is a function of ignorance too. There are plenty of good features in Gmail that are off by default, like undo / delayed send and keyboard shortcuts.
    - mrweasel 1y ago
      "Enable delay send - Allows you to undo sending emails for 5 minutes", I'd argue that a lot of people would enable that pretty fast. Keyboard shortcuts probably would work like I'd expect, people like me would go "Hell no, no keyboard shortcuts in browser application EVER", and power users would opt into that in an instant.

charlieyu1 1y ago

A client emailed me for a meeting at Monday 2pm. The Gmail AI immediately marked Monday 2am on my calendar and it cannot even be deleted.

pinkmuffinere 1y ago
Wow i really hope this is a mistake, that sounds like a severe bug
- mort96 1y ago
  Well it's not a "bug". Language models make mistakes; it's a fundamental part of how they function.
  - spankalee 1y ago
    This isn't LLMs. Gmail has been creating calendar events from emails for a long time. The bug would be if the user can't delete the event.
    - OJFord 1y ago
      What makes you think it hasn't long been using a large language model for it though? Maybe not Large Language Model, the term seems to have come with ChatGPT et al., but Google's been doing machine learning for a long long time; the transformer architecture paper (kind of the groundwork for the current wave) was published by a Google team in 2017. A lot of new Google features are branded 'AI', because it's so hyped it has broad consumer awareness, but a lot of Google features for a long time have used AI and just been brandless or at least 'AI'-less features.
    - birdman3131 1y ago
      It started about a month ago for me. I am subscribed to emails from an IT as a Gig platform called Field Nation. Thought I might pickup a bit of side work but never did. Recently it started adding them to my calendar and there is no way to turn off this feature without also turning off useful features such as package out for delivery notifications.

NelsonMinar 1y ago

Could use a more reliable source for this report. I paid for and tried Google AI for Gmail and was appalled at how bad it is. The product team there is really not executing well. I've switched now to Shortwave. It works very well and having LLM+RAG queries for 20+ years of email archives has been very helpful to me.

cpursley 1y ago

I’ve found the email thread summary pretty useful ymmv.

pflenker 1y ago

Tangentially related, the AI integrated in Google Chat is hilariously bad. Find a thread which starts with „Bug: (…)“ that has 90+ answers. Hey, an AI could be useful here! Click summarize. Wait. Without fail the result will be along the lines of „X, Y and Z discuss a bug.“

londons_explore 1y ago
It would be fine if you could then reply with 'no, please tell me about the nature of the bug not the people involved', and then have it remember that forever. However nearly nobody seems to correctly implement this user-wide memory.

renewiltord 1y ago

Yeah, you gotta watch out for this stuff. The other day I was using Gmail when it just gave me a million dollars. I gave it to charity under an assumed name. Can’t screenshot without revealing the name but I think it’s actually super cool of Google to do this. Just distributed charity. With no benefit to themselves. They did say that they did it based on my Google Photos showing that I was really good looking (can’t share because of privacy) so there’s some privacy stuff there but overall I think it’s good.

shortrounddev2 1y ago

I moved to ProtonMail right before their CEO started mouthing off about his dipshit opinions. I still use them because it's cheaper to pay for a family plan and get a VPN, password manager, and storage along with the email. I used to pay for each of these services individually and was paying 2x what I pay now

renewiltord 1y ago
ProtonMail also does this. Someone actually told me they got an email from me and when I checked it said “this mail was AI generated”. I can’t screenshot it though. Personal reasons.
barbazoo 1y ago
> I used to pay for each of these services individually and was paying 2x what I pay now What's the other factor though and is it worth the getting walled in? Password manager in my opinion has to be its own thing, has nothing to do with the rest, same for VPN. I can see email, calendar and data being close together as being beneficial in every day flow. That's where Fastmail for instance draws the line I think. If you untangle these, would the cost not be worth the benefit?

doctorpangloss 1y ago

ha ha, hey google PMs, here's a useful AI feature: > Is this e-mail marketing something?

QuercusMax 1y ago
I recently noticed that some of the emails in my gmail "promotions" inbox aren't emails at all, and are actually undeletable ads from Google.
- roryirvine 1y ago
  If you're willing to use the web ui rather than the native app, then uBlock Origin will successfully remove those ads. Otherwise, you could always just switch the "promotions" tab off - the contents will show up in your main inbox, but without the ads.

azhenley 1y ago

This is why I am building a better AI for my inbox.

psygn89 1y ago

Can it can help answer my questions on behalf of my clients that use gmail?

apparent 1y ago

And yet google's spam filters still let through so much AI slop spam. Any email from a new sender should be suspect, and if it has an awkwardly phrased opt-out line ("if you'd rather not hear from me again, just shoot me a "leave out"") then it should presumptively be marked as spam.

jeffbee 1y ago
Spam classification has virtually zero to do with the contents of the message.
- apparent 1y ago
  I have the gmail app set to only notify me for "important messages," and it pretty reliably doesn't trigger a notification for this junk. I wish I could have it use that system (whatever it's using) to actually flag messages as spam/mass emails. If it's a seemingly personal message from an unknown sender, send it to spam. If it looks like a mass email (that someone might have signed up for), then put it in the Commercial tab or whatever it's called, so I can set up a filter for it or unsubscribe.
  - jeffbee 1y ago
    I think letting your email app raise notifications is a mistake, and I can see how letting it do that would amplify the annoyance of any misclassified messages.
    - apparent 1y ago
      Until about 9 months ago it was not an issue. I'm glad the gmail app has the "important only" feature, but just wish it was given more power so that when I'm at my computer they are properly categorized there as well.

notatoad 1y ago

am i missing something here, or is this really just a random two-sentence gripe from some guy, complaining about something that nobody else can reproduce? "dave is mad at gmail". okay dave.

reaperducer 1y ago
am i missing something here, or is this really just a random two-sentence gripe from some random guy, complaining about something that nobody else can reproduce? You have just summarized HN, and most of social media and the blogosphere, in 2025. The internet is 44% angry people getting off on being angry about nothing.
- notatoad 1y ago
  i feel like HN is usually at least a little bit better than this. the comments are often full of silly gripes, but they don't usually get voted up to the top of the homepage and stay there for hours
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]

uptown 1y ago

GMail started inserting package delivery notifications at the top of my inbox screen. Not exactly ideal for Christmas shopping with family milling about. If you turn it off, you lose the tabs for email categorization, so instead I wrote a CSS rule to hide it permanently, but it's a bad feature.

jeffbee 1y ago
Not sure what you mean here. You can disable package status and still keep tabbed inbox.

einpoklum 1y ago

Please do yourself and the world a measure of good, and stop using GMail. Giving someone a GMail address is like saying "Yes, I like to be abused, I like to be violated and have no privacy". It is quite embarrassing - and people who are tech-savvy should be telling their colleagues and peers that it is embarrassing and inappropriate. Yes, I realize that dropping the GMail mailbox does not mean you are free from GMail, because of all of the other people on it. But we must each make some effort to chip away at that thing. Twenty years ago, when Microsoft's hold on PCs was much stronger than it is today, online venues were inundated with derision and denouncement of them and their practices; but these days - it's as though Alphabet/Google control of all these aspects of so many people's lives is just neutral reality, ho-hum, nothing to waste time thinking about.

hilbert42 1y ago

I'm truly thankful I deleted my Gmail account years ago and my smartphone has no account and no g-apps. Do we have to riot in the streets before governments regulate this shit?

nichos 1y ago
Why regulate it? You don't have to use it (as you clearly moved elsewhere). Out of curiosity, where did you move to?
- hilbert42 1y ago
  "Why regulate it?" That doesn't require an answer—both sides of the fence already well know the reasons and they're diametrically opposite. I didn't move anywhere, what gave you the impression I did?
  - nichos 1y ago
    You said you deleted your Gmail, I'm assuming you moved to another service.
    - hilbert42 1y ago
      I had multiple services before Gmail was even conceived as I do now. I've had several Gmail accounts, the first was in the early days when one had to be introduced by an existing member (Gmail address) before one could join—a colleague sponsored me. The others were 'anonymous' accounts for testing email crested somewhat later after Google had realized that cliquey club memberships made no money.

Animats 1y ago

You have to wonder what Gmail reports about you. Does it detect suicidal thoughts? Child sexual abuse? Antifa activity?

spankalee 1y ago

I've never flagged a submission before, but I just have to with this one. There's no evidence, no blurred-out screen shot even, no one here has seen this behavior in the comments, and I can't find any corroborating reports on the web. Who knows what's really happening or not here?

andy99 1y ago
Anyone remember the news story about Metallica copyrighting G and F chords? It’s sort of like that, true or not it’s so on brand that people just accept it, it doesn’t tell you something you did already know about how google (or Metallica) behave. https://www.metalunderground.com/news/details.cfm?newsid=5752 https://www.metalunderground.com/news/details.cfm?newsid=575...
- Permit 1y ago
  https://www.smbc-comics.com/comics/1505312920-20170913%20(1).png https://www.smbc-comics.com/comics/1505312920-20170913%20(1)...
  - andy99 1y ago
    I don’t get it
  - raincole 1y ago
    Perfect response lol. Rare to see it's not xkcd.
  - Karrot_Kream 1y ago
    Isn't this HN in a nutshell these days?
    - 0manrho 1y ago
      The internet at large really.
brazukadev 1y ago

jimt1234 1y ago

Where I work, we get tons of feedback from customers, basically saying, "How do I disable this new AI feature? I never asked for this." Yet, the guidance from leadership is very clear: "More AI!" I suspect it's like this at Google (and everywhere else), too.

glerk 1y ago

Google must have some awful PMs and designers. The worst UX decision I have seen recently is AI auto-dubbing all youtube videos by default with no way to disable this behavior globally. How could you miss that people can be fluent in multiple languages and if I click on a video in a foreign language, I most likely want the original soundtrack? Clearly, the intention was to boost some metric “X users are using this feature” with no regard for the actual user.

jack_pp 1y ago
+1, this is the most annoying YouTube feature I've ever come across. Gave them feedback on it.. maybe more people should complain
- jimmyl02 1y ago
  if it increases topline metrics like watch time it's probably hard for them to justify removing it. a change this big seems like it was probably a/b tested and did move metrics significantly?
  - cedilla 1y ago
    Probably. We keep watching all kind of stuff after getting baited into it. AI slob is annoying, but we do want to know what chefs do about sticky pizza dough, or what that secret in the pyramids is, or how the kid reacted to what the cat did, or (insert your guilty pleasure here).
    - xp84 1y ago
      on some platforms I try to be really good about hitting the "Never recommend this channel/page/whatever again" whenever the algo serves me the bottom-tier gutter trash videos, such as the "idiotic life hack that obviously won't work" engagement bait. It's a small drop in the ocean, but at least that one channel will never be served to me again.
MetaMalone 1y ago

estebarb 1y ago

Something I noticed recently is that titles of youtube videos are automatically translated. I'm convinced that nobody in Google speaks more than one language, otherwise they would have never done that. It is impossible to turn off the unsolicited translations in search, and now youtube. I'm scared that soon they will force up audio translation as well.

machomaster 1y ago
It's not only the titles, but the descriptions as well. And viewers can't turn this behavior off, only the channel creator can and most will not.

randerson 1y ago

I've been a long-time Gmail user with a paid plan. But recently two issues are annoying me enough that I'm considering leaving: 1. The incessant "Using Gmail to run your business?" upsells. No, I'm unemployed and this is a personal account. Unlike the AI upsell, I can't seem to dismiss this permanently. It just snoozes it until the next time I open it. 2. The Search bar has become dangerously glitchy (at least in Firefox for Mac) if you type fast and have keyboard shortcuts on. It lets me type 1 or 2 characters before it starts treating every character as a shortcut, inadvertently deleting, muting, archiving emails. Search is what sets Gmail apart and now it is unusable. I reported this bug to Google months ago and my patience is running thin.

thunderbong 1y ago
I've always found the Gmail search bar glitchy on Firefox but never on Chrome browsers. I'll be typing something in the search box and suddenly I'll end up navigating somewhere with the keyboard focus having gotten removed from there.

MinimalAction 1y ago

I can see how it is useful: for some people, reading and writing emails is a dreadful activity. But it is also an important facet of every human activity -- communication. So, it better be intentional and clear. I have turned off all smart features and let me handle how to say what I want to say.

troyvit 1y ago
Man I was in a Google News Initiative meeting and they started with a "fun poll" where they asked how you'd feel if you read an email that you knew was written by AI. Lots of people didn't mind knowing that was the case, and it was mainly for the reasons you put out writing emails is legit not fun for a lot of people. Man I was so triggered though, like old-man-yelling-at-clouds level. Then I went back through gmail and exactly one of the last 50 most recent emails I've received was not an alert or a newsletter or an invite. IOW out of my last 50 emails only one of them would've fit the bill for an AI-written correspondence taking the place of a human-written one. All that butt-hurt and it doesn't even matter. So long way of getting around to saying that your point about intentionality and clarity is clutch, and if people can get that with AI-written emails maybe I can cool my jets.

butz 1y ago

Is there a way to suspend/disable Gmail account in a way, that no bad actors could overtake it, after Google disables/deletes(?) it after period of two years?

david_van_loon 1y ago

I've seen no indications of this supposed feature in my own experience or other sources. The article does not provide any evidence to support its claims.

phyzome 1y ago

...I'm confused, is there something I'm missing in this post? I only see 4 sentences, with almost no information.

havaloc 1y ago

One of my tech clients emailed me about a Roku problem and one of the AI suggestions in Gmail was to tell the customer to try unplugging a Roku for a minute and plugging it back in. I pressed that button, proofread the suggested text, and hit send. In truth it felt both amazing and made me uneasy, for AI was encroaching on my career of telling people to reboot their errant device.

isaachinman 1y ago

For anyone looking for a cross-platform, local-first IMAP email client that "just works" and doesn't jam AI down your throat, check us out: https://marcoapp.io https://marcoapp.io

stOneskull 1y ago
i do about 95% of my emailing in thunderbird on my computer, and 5% in the gmail app on my phone or on the specific email's website. all imap so they're basically synced already. i'm wondering if your marco app will be useful for my use case, and what the benefits would be. i think i would lose some benefits such as thunderbird extensions. also, to use proton mail on my phone i think i need the protonmail app. i use the proton bridge to use it in thunderbird. would the marco app work with proton on computer but not on phone?

testdelacc1 1y ago

All this AI is great. What I really want is to clean up my inbox by seeing where the mails are coming from. What I want is `select sender, count(*) from emails group by 1 order by 2 desc` or the equivalent. But I guess that doesn’t juice the stock price like AI does.

pseufaux 1y ago
Unrelated, but if you have an iPhone, I use Chuck for this. The free tier is plenty if you just want to use it to clean up the inbox. https://chuck.email https://chuck.email
DANmode 1y ago
Gmail can “Filter Messages Like This”, in a number of algorithmic ways, when a message row is selected.

sodapopcan 1y ago

Stop using Google products.

alex1138 1y ago

Do one thing and do it well, you assholes Be dumb pipes Google has already arguably ruined Youtube, which they own, over a period of many, many years It doesn't matter if the community does all the work, the company will MITM themselves to make themselves look more important than they are

raincole 1y ago

I'll save you a click: > Gmail doesn't just offer to write your emails for you, they actually do it, and it's up to you to delete the text it wrote. > Hard to make a screen shot to demo without revealing personal info. That's how awful this thing is. > It reeks of desperation. This is the whole article. That's it. No screenshot. No details. Nothing. Just three random sentences. 200+ upvote on HN btw.

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

SanjayMehta 1y ago

Most of the time I'm on IMAP for gmail et al, so I haven't seen this yet. How long before some Google PM decided to turn off IMAP access?

cat-whisperer 1y ago

I agree, but on the same level. The interface of email client and sheets client is so intuitive. It should be a interesting engineering problem to implement AI for these tools. spreadsheet truly is a universal interface for number crunching, and not being able to use AI inside sheets is a bummer.