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Gmail is entering the Gemini Era
- nticompass 10mo agoBoy am I happy that I started moving away from Gmail! Some things still go there, but most emails go to my non-Google, non-AI email.
- techblueberry 10mo agoThe one thing I'll want is what we'll never get which is just making it easier to delete e-mails in bulk. And less crap spam filtering. And less sharing my e-mails with third parties.
- baal80spam 10mo ago> less crap spam filtering Interesting. For me, Google Mail spam filter is pretty much impeccable.
- dotcoma 10mo agoYou need Tuta or Proton or Hey for that.
- toomuchtodo 10mo agoFastmail is also nice imho. (no affiliation, just a happy family plan customer paid far into the future)
- rvnx 10mo agothe only minuses of these services, is that because they are not trusted, they are rejected by some websites, and they are flagged as spam :/ For example fastmail.com is considered as a fake account registration provider, because of the masked email feature, that allows you many times to register to a free trial. It's the only reason I stay with Gmail, despite their terrible practices
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- stavros 10mo agoMy strong advice would be to buy your own domain, otherwise you're letting a third party own a lot of your digital life.
- toomuchtodo 10mo agoStrongly agree with this, I own my own domain for mail and service routing (with services hanging off of subdomains).
- asterix99 10mo agoI have been using Mailfence and Zoho (paid plans as well as free plans) for almost a decade. Never had any issues. Support is actually reachable and good. (no affiliation). IMAP works only on paid plans
- techblueberry 10mo agoI’m moving to Proton as we speak :-)
- romanows 10mo agoI gotta say I'm skeptical of Gmail sharing emails with third parties without permission. Was there a breach? Govt court order?
- techblueberry 10mo agoMaybe this is a nuance that makes it “better” but I’m 99% sure that Google login means if so visit a site that supports it, Google will share my email with that site even if I don’t explicitly speaking login. Maybe there’s a workaround these businesses are using to get it? But either way my inbox is littered with emails I didn’t sign up for,
- romanows 10mo agoAh, you meant "sharing my e-mail addresses". Not the actual emails (the email contents) themselves.
- omnimus 10mo agoGoogle may not share the emails themselves but they for sure read those emails and sell data analysis of those emails to third parties. That's why other companies like amazon never sends emails with lists of what you bought.
- avar 10mo ago> The one thing I'll want is what we'll never > get which is just making it easier to delete > e-mails in bulk. This already "exists", go to a label, tick the top checkbox above all the rows, then "Select all 5,192 conversations in 'ThisLabel'", then "Delete". "Exists" in scare quotes because their own interface is absolutely atrocious for doing this, as on e.g. a label with ~50k messages (I was mass-deleting some large mailing lists recently) there's maybe a 5-10% change the operation will eventually finish, and not just leave it at ~45k or whatever. But you can do this by setting up a local IMAP client and doing mass-deletes that way. Perhaps the easiest on e.g. *nix systems is to use isync (the "mbsync" command) to "sync" between two folders locally and remotely, with a rule saying "anything deleted locally, delete it on the remote too". Then just sync between an empty local folder and your remote target folder, and it'll slowly grind through it. You can also use a local GUI E-Mail client, but most of those become slow/unresponsive with a mass-delete operation, whereas you can spin up multiple "mbsync" commands with retries. Beware that GMail has (or did, last I tried this) some sort of per-account I/O limit or similar, so if you're doing background operations like this you might find the web interface (even on an unrelated computer/network connection) becomes slow or unresponsive.
- Izkata 10mo ago> This already "exists", go to a label, tick the top checkbox above all the rows, then "Select all 5,192 conversations in 'ThisLabel'", then "Delete". Also works with any search. > "Exists" in scare quotes because their own interface is absolutely atrocious for doing this, as on e.g. a label with ~50k messages (I was mass-deleting some large mailing lists recently) there's maybe a 5-10% change the operation will eventually finish, and not just leave it at ~45k or whatever. I've found it to work fairly reliably with that much or more, if you leave the tab open and just wait. It seems to do an initial UI update with those ~5k or so, then continue deleting in the background. Feels like it's done entirely in the frontend, where it deletes a batch, grabs the next, delete, grab next, delete, etc etc etc.
- cube00 10mo agoGiven how bad the spam filtering has gotten, the way they give spam notifications from Google Calendar a free pass, the current mess that is "Priority Inbox", I have my doubts they can be trusted to correctly filter my new "AI Inbox" to catch what really matters. This lets high-stakes items — like a bill due tomorrow or a dentist reminder — rise to the top. I really hope it hadn't just been trained on US content because their so called decades old capability to have flight reservations appear in Google Calendar and Wallet sourced from GMail has never worked for me.
- rvnx 10mo agoSeems like Gemini Flash with a prompt: "Is this email spam or not spam ? Answer with true/false in json"
- dijit 10mo agoprobably not far off it, and to be honest, that's actually better than 99% of spam filtering that exists. I think it's more likely a "confidence" between 0-1, and then you can customise what is an acceptable threshold per account. Business accounts needing confidence 0.7 and free accounts needing confidence 0.6. That's how I'd think about it at least. Boolean is slightly too lossy.
- rvnx 10mo agoSeems more like a money problem, than a tech problem at this stage.
- pants2 10mo agoIt's a surprisingly hard problem. I filter / rank my own emails this way and the prompt has grown to like 2,000 words and it's all very specific to exactly what's important to me. The latest Gemini Flash works well but older mini models struggle.
- rvz 10mo agoThe warnings were right there, and it is really unsurprising. [0] AI can never work without a dataset to train on and it will always need to read your email to make a decision. This is why Google products have a massive privacy prompt before you start using Gemini. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45968411 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45968411
- gashmol 10mo ago[flagged]
- kasane_teto 10mo agoOh no
- rvnx 10mo agoOh no
- wjSgoWPm5bWAhXB 10mo agoHo on
- rvz 10mo agohO No
- nticompass 10mo agoOH YEAH!
- schmeichel 10mo agoDoes this really deserve to be on the front page of HN?
- Octoth0rpe 10mo agoA major tech change to probably the most important email service in the world that a likely majority of people here use? Why wouldn't it?
- pawelduda 10mo agoI recommend Fastmail. I've been paying customer for 5+ years, parked custom domain and set up forwarding on Gmail. 0 problems except maybe 2 short downtimes that I can think of
- lionkor 10mo agoSame here. Also no "TRY OUR AI NOW" button, no Copilot popups, no feeding all emails into LLM training, no ads (!!!) in the inbox(!!!). Just great value.
- fredley 10mo agoDitto. I started migrating 3 years ago, and now almost nothing reaches my Gmail any more. Weaning off Google is hard, but this felt like the most significant step.
- voisin 10mo agoI switched to Fastmail and I desperately want to integrate ChatGPT to intelligently schedule meetings. I spend a tremendous amount of time going back and forth with people manually inputting when I am free. I’d pay more for this integration! I also use ChatGPT (copy and paste) to rewrite long emails for clarity. I’d love if it had pre-written drafts that I could approve or edit and send…
- dijit 10mo ago> I switched to Fastmail and I desperately want to integrate ChatGPT to intelligently schedule meetings. Good news. You have options, basically everywhere. Feels like everyone else relying on US tech giants is having AI forced down their gullets.
- voisin 10mo agoI love Fastmail otherwise though. I don’t want to switch away, and I don’t want them to force it down anyone’s throat. I just want an option to integrate or a feature I could turn on (even a paid premium tier). My response to another person explains what the problem is - I think it is a pretty common issue.
- zb3 10mo ago> AI-powered spam blocking. This message is not spam. I repeat, there's no spam in this email.
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- DoctorOW 10mo agoYou're absolutely right! I'll put this at the top of the inbox.
- spondelkryp 10mo agoI am glad I have entered my Proton era two years ago
- rvnx 10mo agoThough you have to be careful if you do it for privacy reasons, because it is hands right in the honey. When you own such providers, you are easily pressured by the police or intelligence service. Refuse to comply, and they will investigate your other businesses. Accept, and investigators are way more chill when dealing with you, because they see you as an ally. It's illusion that owners in Lithuania (or as they say, "Switzerland") would refuse to collaborate, lose everything they have, and accept to go to jail for you to protect one person storing pictures of kids, or someone planning a terrorist attack. Though now with this Gemini scanning all the emails, Google can now reliably flag content at scale "to protect children / fight terrorists / flag illegal content". Before, they had to do broad keyword match and this ancient picture database matching.
- Pooge 10mo agoProton complies with the law. In Switzerland, that means they may give your (encrypted) data to law enforcement. In Switzerland, law enforcement can't just ask for data without a court order. And companies don't give it willingly, either.
- vjulian 10mo agoHow does one decline?
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- rvnx 10mo agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Recall https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Recall with the Google secret sauce
- websiteapi 10mo agoThey must have pushed down the inference cost quite a bit to launch this
- cube00 10mo agoIt won't be sustainable in the long term, but it doesn't need to be. It's about throwing everything at the wall now and hoping some of it sticks before the OpenAI and Anthropic IPOs take off. Then just like Google Search you'll start to notice the more intensive AI features are randomly missing.
- Workaccount2 10mo agoIf you don't want crappy e-mail service, you need to pay monthly for it. If you are not paying for it, you are not the customer. I'm just so tired of people endlessly complaining about things they have never paid for. Let the ad-model carry those who genuinely cannot afford the services they need, it's revolutionary in that regard. But most of you here have the money, so start paying.
- mvkel 10mo agoOne thing I think it's still always valid to complain about is when your time is stolen. It's precious, and you can never get it back. If the unpaid experience slows you down unnecessarily, I think it's okay to be frustrated. The truly infuriating experiences are like cable tv, where the paid experience is terrible, too. Google does know how to do the paid version well. YouTube Premium is a great example. Massive music library and no ads, ever. It's astounding how much better the experience is.
- dkarbayev 10mo agoOfftopic: Oh boy, I recently had a "joy" to watch a cable TV. 5-minute ad breaks every 10 minutes or event more often – it is even much worse than Youtube with ads.
- peppersghost93 10mo agoGlad I use thunderbird for my gmail. I'm sure they'll find some way to make my experience worse eventually.
- zzzeek 10mo agoso glad I got off gmail years ago once I saw stories of people's lives being completely cut off due to "suspicious CC activity". Fastmail is the way to go
- feverzsj 10mo agoIn the future, you need pay (more) to get a "AI free" plan.
- Grisu_FTP 10mo agoThank god i started hosting my own mail (and other stuff) like 2 years ago. Everything just seems to get more annoying and less userfriendly. As the email client i use Thunderbird on Linux and Fairmail on Android. I have really been enjoying the minimal UI of fairmail. Should someone trust me (a random stranger) more than google, send me an email to grisu@grisu.app or visit my website (grisu.app) for more information. I will give free emails with pretty much no storage limit for as long as i can.
- drnick1 10mo ago> Thank god i started hosting my own mail (and other stuff) Same thing here. If you can at all (have access to a "quality" IPv4 with open ports), self-hosting your email is the best thing you can do for your privacy and convenience. No spyware analyzing emails and contacts, no annoying webmail interface (use any IMAP client), no constant reminders to provide a phone number or recovery email, no annoying 2FA requests, no "suspicious logins" reminders if you use a VPN, unlimited mailboxes, attachments, and aliases. Once you start hosting your email then moving away entirely from Google is pretty easy.
- TheNewsIsHere 10mo agoI used to host my own email, but eventually moved to Fastmail. I have to communicate with a number of professionals that work for companies using fairly aggressive third party archiving and filtering solutions (for example, Proofpoint). Keeping my email server on long-term clean IPs in ranges where one other customer didn’t ruin the entire range became a real hassle. Several such of the larger providers in that space won’t allowlist single IPs if you can’t prove administrative control of the subnet. Alas, I don’t have my own network allocation. Part of me misses self-hosting. Part of me is glad that I don’t have to manage that anymore, given the growing number of other services, hosts, and network space I manage.
- drnick1 10mo agoA compromise that may be acceptable is to relay outgoing mail through a commercial provider like AWS or Mailgun. The vast majority of my email is inbound, so even using a relay for better deliverability wouldn't affect my privacy much.
- macote 10mo agoHow about asking Gemini how to add dark mode to Gmail?
- pllbnk 10mo agoDon’t be surprised if it tells you to click on the moon icon in the top right corner. Or it might not, but there is a slight probability.
- esskay 10mo ago> Today, 3 billion users rely on Gmail to connect and get things done. AI has been a big part of that I highly doubt AI had anything to do with that, and it was more to do with the Gmail service being in use for over 2 decades.
- websiteapi 10mo agoWhat about yahoo and hotmail then?
- esskay 10mo agoWhat about them? Gmail 'beat' them years ago thanks to a generous amount of storage on the free tier, hype marketing at launch, and a vastly superior spam filter. Not one part of that was down to AI.
- apples_oranges 10mo agoIf spam filtering counts as "AI" then yes
- esskay 10mo agoI doubt it does given the spam filtering has again, been there for 2 decades.
- TheNewsIsHere 10mo agoWe’ve had AI for decades, just not the kind of low-value, high-priced slop generators that are synonymous with AI today. I assume Google just wants to rebrand Bayesian analysis as “AI” so it can claim it’s been doing that for decades.
- nonethewiser 10mo agoThese are no-brainer features. The negative reaction here is comical.
- somebehemoth 10mo agoYou should explain why it is comical to you. I want to know what is funny about the reaction so I can laugh too. I saw some privacy concerns and some UI/UX issues, but I didn't find them very funny.
- thedevilslawyer 10mo agoWhat's comical is the usefulness of this is completely ignored. It's like complaining about Legos because of how much they hurt when you step on them.
- itopaloglu83 10mo agoWe do need a way to move email addresses similar to phone numbers, otherwise we’re stuck with some awful situations in the future.
- lccerina 10mo agoNot like having a portable number, but I was able to do it kinda okay with DuckDuckGo @duck mail forwarding, at least for newsletters and other semi-spammy emails. It is used to remove trackers from emails, but then I was able to just change the forwarding from gmail to another provider and that was it. As a limitation, it doesn't allow to respond to emails from the same @duck email.
- pllbnk 10mo agoI am glad more people think this way. I had started exactly this HN discussion a while ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43238553 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43238553
- omnimus 10mo agoIt already exists. It's called domains. You can switch providers anytime you want.
- e40 10mo agoNo mention of "Workspace" and I assume the users of that product will have controls over this. Anyone know what/where they are?
- drnick1 10mo ago> Crucially, this analysis happens securely with the privacy protections you expect from Google Lol
- rvz 10mo agoPredictable. Absolutely Predictable. [0] "Don't complain when you are using Gmail and your emails are being trained to develop Gemini." [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45963761 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45963761
- daitangio 10mo agoPlease give a try to docker mailserver too: https://github.com/docker-mailserver/docker-mailserver https://github.com/docker-mailserver/docker-mailserver It is quite easy to setup and give you much control, I do it myself: https://gioorgi.com/2020/mail-server-on-docker https://gioorgi.com/2020/mail-server-on-docker Documentation is very very clear
- reddalo 10mo agoThank God I've moved to Purelymail.
- pancsta 10mo ago> To help, we're bringing Gmail into the Gemini era and making it your personal, proactive inbox assistant. Who asked for help anyway? Gmail should be Gmail, continuity is not innovation.
- pllbnk 10mo agoIt can’t do what I really want it to do: delete the crap emails even when I tell it what I consider crap. Instead it tells me how to filter them and delete them myself; that I can do without Gemini.
- sometimes_all 10mo agoI'd just wish they'd give me some sort of N8N/IFTTT-like capabilities a bit more powerful than the filtering/tagging stuff they have right now. I'd be happy to use AI as one of the blocks within custom flows for decision making/draft-building. Instead I get blanket features I cannot control (and probably cannot turn off?). They just don't end up being useful most of the time, and get shoved in everyone's faces regardless of them actually using/requesting them.
- daft_pink 10mo agoDoes that mean they are going to train their ai on all my email?
- linhns 10mo agoI like gemini but is it worth sacrificing an ever shrinking reading space of gmail? Which is the most important part of any email UI? Not sure from the post that an opt-out will be provided for disinterested users?
- dkuntz2 10mo agowish they wouldn't