8 ms·

Bye Bye Gmail

142 points by tklenke 9mo ago

tklenke 9mo ago
Recently I was surprised to see a Google Gemini summary at the top of my email on my phone. A day or two later this appeared in my web client as well. Look, I love our new overlords (for the record m'lords I nearly always use please and thank you. I was an early adopter. I still am a frequent user..I mean someone who has all the answers and blows smoke up my ass..perfect right! Despite that, it appears it's not good for me (https://www.media.mit.edu/publications/your-brain-on-chatgpt/ https://www.media.mit.edu/publications/your-brain-on-chatgpt...) It's great, it's easy, makes me feel good in the moment..of course it's bad for me! Here's the thing. I like to read things from my friends that they have taken the time to write. I personally hate texting. All the nuance is gone. Often the humor. Sad. Makes me want to have a beer with you...eye contact...blech. The LAST thing I want is a summary...at the top of the email...highlighted..that I CANNOT turn off. I tried to turn it off. I can. It's under `Gmail -> Settings -> General -> Smart Features (checkbox)`. BUT..the AI summaries is now grouped with the Smart Tabs. For those of you who do not use Gmail Smart Tabs, Smart Tabs (officially the Tabbed Inbox) have been part of Gmail since 2013; well actually the technology behind them—Smart Labels—actually debuted two years earlier. (Thank you Gemini, yes I DO truly love you. Tell me again about the comparisons of Stephen Miller and Heinrich Himmler's tactics please?) Smart Tabs automatically sort my incoming flood of solicited commercial email (cue laughter from those who know my first start-up) into five buckets: * Primary: Email from you. * Promotions: K&L Wine Merchants at the top of the list. * Social: Hi Andrew on Facebook (that I only log into from Firefox running on a VM). * Update: Actual transactional emails from companies. * Forums: The Information at the top of the list (a newsletter I'd like to read but don't want to make the time justify paying for the content). I tried turning off Smart Features and oh my, that's not usable. So I lived with the AI summary at the top. For a week. Then this morning, I saw several messages in my Primary tab that normally get sorted into Promotions, Social, Updates or Forums. This is not unheard of; sometimes a company uses a new incoming address or something and stuff gets put in the wrong bucket. But THIS time, I got a popup that says I must "Share" this message with Google and links to the Privacy Policy and Google Terms of Service. And an explicit sentence: "Messages and attachments might be reviewed by humans, so don't share any sensitive or confidential information." I'm not naive. I'm an early adopter, my email address includes my name and no numbers. I AM a direct marketer. From the get-go, having Google read my email in order to provide targeted advertising was part of the deal. I was fine with that. BUT...now...what they are saying is that...we are going to use your email to train our LLMs. I'm not okay with that. That knowledge of my way of writing, my personal details, my confidential commercial information is NOT okay to use to train your models. 'Cause I expect mistakes will be made and more information will reside in the model than those at Google (or FB, MSFT etc) intended. And I'm not really up for assuming that risk. So...goodbye Gmail. It's been great. Really great. I'm sure I'll miss you. Bye. My email is now being hosted by Microsoft, so hopefully will be free of the outages and limits some of you have experienced with that email in the past. There it will reside until I cannot turn off MSFT's ability to read my email. Then I guess it's off to Switzerland ( [https://proton.me/about https://proton.me/about](https://proton.me/about https://proton.me/about) ); my email can be with my gold. JK. Tom p.s. why thank you Gemini for reformatting that for me into a clean, engaging markdown blog post. Yes, I do agree this is a sharp, timely take on the "AI-ification" of tools we use every day. I love you. Kill me last?
- CTOSian 9mo ago
  you can use your gmail on zoho, they have some low cost plans
  - mapontosevenths 9mo ago
    How will that prevent google from training AI's on his data?
    - CTOSian 9mo ago
      no idea, do they really read any darn email on storage, or just when you use their webmail/android app?
- shawn_w 9mo ago
  Other long-time features are now tied to having those stupid summaries enabled too. It's an all or nothing deal. So frustrating and unnecessary.
  - B1FIDO 9mo ago
    Speaking of botched LLM summaries, my bank has been doing this to me for several months now. Instead of the transaction info which is strictly defined and uniformly formatted, they've attempted to give "friendly names" to each one and "simplify" the descriptions. This has been a supremely bad idea. Firstly, it deprives me of essential info about each transaction, which I cannot access at all in the mobile app. I need to go into the website on a desktop computer, click through a few screens to say "this description is incorrect!" and request that they show me the original. The "simple descriptions" elide a lot of useful info, such as the vendor's phone number. Sometimes they are completely incorrect, like the name of my church gets a completely different and misleading name in every transaction. I cannot disable this. Last year, there was a transaction during tax time that I believed to be some sort of penalty by the government, and I was freaking out about it, but it turned out to actually be my refund and had been "helpfully renamed" by my bank to be extremely misleading. I have discussed these issues with the online support staff, and in person at my branch, and they are sympathetic, but there is nothing they can do about the app, and the only workaround for me is to individually flag each transaction as it comes in, and fix it, and there is no "global disable" or "global unfuck everything" button for any of us, anywhere.
throwaway2056 9mo ago
> I tried turning off Smart Features and oh my, that's not usable. Why? What did it do? This is the problem. Overload. It is not a google problem. If you get 200 emails - even without AI - just by using Thunderbird or k9mail (android) it will be a problem. edit: https://support.google.com/mail/answer/15604322?hl=en https://support.google.com/mail/answer/15604322?hl=en I cannot find that "Messages and attachments might be reviewed by humans, so don't share any sensitive or confidential information." anywhere. Of course, there is nothing wrong about changing the provider. Variety is good.
- B1FIDO 9mo ago
  I had Smart Features enabled for years. Years! They worked okay. They put good accurate stuff on my calendar and so there was useful work being done by the AI in background. Unfortunately, in the past few months, Gemini AI really started shoving its way in. And there were some features that were really unpalatable, that were basically dealbreakers for this. Yeah, I believe the "AI Summaries" had a lot to do with it. They were bad, misleading, and I did not want them crowding up my app. I couldn't disable those features without disabling Smart Features entirely. So that's what I did. So now I sort of suffer without the automatic email event-calendar integrations, and the other cool stuff that AI had provided, but it's totally usable. I have no trouble using it as an email service with that AI disabled. It works fine. Anyway, it is no secret that Google has always used the text of our emails for their own marketing and analysis purposes. Always has. Why did you think Gmail was a free service? Obviously, you were paying for it! We all paid for it with our email content!
- tim333 9mo ago
  I've been a gmail user without smart features for years. I'm guessing the 'not usable' was too much junk drowning out important messages. The answer usually is spending 5 minutes clicking 'unsubscribe' on the stuff you are not bothered about.
sodapopcan 9mo ago
It would have been nicer if this was about a general Google boycott in general, but this will do too.
throw7 9mo ago
"My email is now being hosted by Microsoft..." Out of the pan, into the fire. my recommendation: i've been happily using fastmail for years.
- andrewchilds 9mo ago
  Maybe it’s just me, but I have serious issue with Fastmail’s spam filtering. Meaning, it seems that I am the spam filter. I find myself considering closing the account on a regular basis because of it. I am also extremely frustrated with Gmail’s AI features now being apparently impossible to disable.
  - rationalist 9mo ago
    Fastmail's spam filter has been better than Gmail's spam filter in my experience.
  - tamimio 9mo ago
    Thier spam filter is really great, probably only one time they flagged a legit email as a spam. On the other hand, the email I have that uses fastmail never ended in someone’s spam.
  - sph 9mo ago
    > Fastmail’s spam filtering I had issues with it early on, and after some back and forth with support they explained to me what is going on: it takes about 200 spam emails before your personalized filter kicks in, before that you might see something slip through. Also, the spam filter updates after you delete emails from your spam folder. Just remember to empty your spam folder, and add some custom rules until you reach that 200 threshold. 5+ years in, everything is working great, nothing to complain, best email provider I've ever used. I only wish they had servers in the EU.
    - aeurielesn 9mo ago
      This has been my number one request for fastmail for years. They're happy with GDPR compliance but no intentions of having EU servers.
codingjoe 9mo ago
#di_day #ccc ;)
- zahlman 9mo ago
  ... What does this mean in the current context?
latchkey 9mo ago
I'm very happy with MimeStream. I get gmail, without the UX of gmail, and something that I can command-tab into, instead of a browser window.
- nelsonfigueroa 9mo ago
  Looked up Mimestream. So it's a subscription-based app that basically gives you nicer UI/UX for your google emails. Oof.
  - latchkey 9mo ago
    $50/year for a nice app that I use on a daily basis to make my life better? Worth every penny.
    - noitpmeder 9mo ago
      But google still is presumably still training their AIs on your email content regardless if you don't use their frontend.
      - latchkey 9mo ago
        OPs issue was more clearly directed at "A week or two ago I was surprised to see a Google Gemini summary at the top of my email on my phone", which Mimestream doesn't include. The rest of the complaint was about a bug that happened, just today, with sorting and spam control.
        noitpmeder 9mo ago
        OP meaning the author of the linked article? Maybe I missed the mark but I felt his main rejection of Gmail ended up being because they train their AI based on his private and or commercial data.
        latchkey 9mo ago
r0b05 9mo ago
Is it easy and advisable to host your own email server on vps?
- rationalist 9mo ago
  I am no expert, but from what I've read... Easy: I don't think so. Advisable: Hell no. I believe you have to constantly maintain it, and good luck with deliverability. Anyone: correct me if I'm wrong.
  - nine_k 9mo ago
    Not an expert, but I suppose that you can safely receive email using a self-hosted SMTP server. Sending it without being blacklisted / greylisted is trickier. If you don't want to muck with obtaining an IPv4 with a good karma, there are options to send via large providers, such as GMail (IIRC free), or AWS SES, or things like Sendgrid or Brevo. The latter may be effectively free if you send only a handful of emails per day.
    - technothrasher 9mo ago
      I found when I tried out using SES, Sendgrid, Brevo, etc to send emails for my self-hosted exim instance, that my deliverability actually went down compared to sending the mail directly. I believe it was because for the free/low cost tiers they dump you onto IP addresses where they're also playing wack-a-mole with spammers. SMTP2GO was the only one I found that had decent deliverability at a free/low cost for low volumes. Still, I only use it for my personal email. For my business, I host our mail on Fastmail.
  - sdoering 9mo ago
    I host a few client marketing & transactional mails. Mostly sending stuff from marketing automation/newsletter software. Not an issue. Will be migrating the first few domains of off paid google workspace E-Mail to a self hosted solution. I actually don’t expect too much trouble. But that’s currently still a hypothesis. I have seen a few people do that successfully. So I know it’s possible. Still. Not having hosted a mail infrastructure in 20 odd years…
nine_k 9mo ago
OK, while I briefly have a bit of your attention: what would you advise to use instead? What I need: * Server-side filters. * Tags. No, not folders. Many of my emails have 2-3 tags, some have 4-5. I wonder if it can even map to IMAP4; I see a few ways to model it. * Good deliverability. * Reasonable spam protection. * Not hugely expensive. Ideally near-free, or self-hosted. What are some options?
- sph 9mo ago
  I've been spamming enough about Fastmail (just a happy user), it ticks all your boxes except near-free/self-hosted. Re: tags, you can switch between classic folders or Gmail-style labels. Re: filtering, it has an easy-to-use UI but you can write your own custom Sieve filtering rules if you want.
- em-bee 9mo ago
  is there any FOSS based webmail and/or IMAP that supports tagging instead of folders? i use supmua (which inspired notmuch) which like gmail uses tags instead of folders. i could not go back to a folder based system. but i am really missing a webmail interface that works with tags.
- eviks 9mo ago
  > * Tags. No, not folders. Why not both?
puttycat 9mo ago
I have more than 20 years of email in my gmail account. How do I even start migrating? And even if I migrate, I will need to keep my address alive and forwarding to my new address at least for a few years. So no privacy gains there either. Does anyone have concrete advice as to how to make the transition?
- bryogenic 9mo ago
  - Start with takeout - Setup automatic forwarding - Then probably just use that old email for searching old emails This has worked okay for me
- arrsingh 9mo ago
  I was in the same boat as you. I tried Fastmail and they have a really great tool that just did it. I was skeptical but after I tried it was very pleased. Give it a shot.
- sodapopcan 9mo ago
  > I will need to keep my address alive and forwarding to my new address at least for a few years. So no privacy gains there either. Ya, there's no way of not letting google know what your new address is, but you're going to be emailing a lot of gmail addresses anyway so there's no way around that, really. But with the forwarding they only know incoming mail. I switched off gmail 3.5 years ago and all I can say is that it wasn't anywhere near as scary as I thought it would be. I setup an auto-responder that would hound people to update their contacts for me and slowly switched over services I cared about (and closed others!) An important point, though, is that I don't really care about old emails. I do still have access to my gmail account, of course, but I have yet to go back. Surely there is a way to export everything and import it into something searchable, though?
- nicholasjarnold 9mo ago
  Fastmail provides an easy way to migrate [0]. I setup a label in my Fastmail account that will tag all mail coming in from Gmail. Then you go through that list at your leisure and make the requisite contact with the people or services emailing at the old address. It's really not difficult at all. I've been on Fastmail for ~4 years now, and haven't once considered looking back or regretted it. Good luck. [0] https://www.fastmail.com/features/migrate/ https://www.fastmail.com/features/migrate/
Foorack 9mo ago
Both me and partner switching to Infomaniak (also Swiss), can recommend. Not E2E encrypted, but kMail is more usable than ProtonMail (also a lot cheaper on all levels). Been using ProtonMail for 5 years but so annoying I can't propely search my emails because of the encryption, can't use standard IMAP without a proprietary connector, and their Drives/Docs suite is missing a lot of features.
- whyagaindavid 9mo ago
  Account creation needs phone number?
arrsingh 9mo ago
I moved my custom domain from google workspace to fastmail a few years ago and didn't look back. Very happy with that decision. The only two downsides: 1. A few people have reported my emails from fastmail (calendar invites mostly) going to their spam folder. Not enough reports so I'm not worried. 2. Google won't let me sign in and create / edit /comment in google docs with my custom email hosted at fastmail so I have to have a random@gmail.com account just to use free google docs to collaborate with people who only send me google docs. Overall I think AI features are going to be great but give me the ability to pick and choose which I enable / disable and we should be good. If not then I agree with OP - Bye Bye Gmail. oh, and don't read my emails and protect my privacy google! - no? Ok bye bye!
ofalkaed 9mo ago
Awhile ago when I logged in to my gmail account I was asked if I wanted to try AI summaries, I clicked "no" and nothing has changed in my user experience in either the web interface or mobile apps. It also told me I could that I could enable or disable AI features with the Gemini icon next to the settings icon, which it looks like I can still do, at least in the web interface. Am I missing something? Being "an early adopter" is not proof of anything other than being an early adopter.
whyagaindavid 9mo ago
https://mako.cc/copyrighteous/google-has-most-of-my-email-because-it-has-all-of-yours https://mako.cc/copyrighteous/google-has-most-of-my-email-be... Sure. Google Has Most of My Email Because It Has All of Yours
- stonogo 9mo ago
  I’m not sure what to do except encourage others to consider, in the wake of the Snowden revelations and everything else, whether you really want Google to have all your email. And half of mine. Looks like this article and the one you're replying to are in agreement.
  - coffe2mug 9mo ago
    Many businesses use office365 or Google. They then have all your email. Fingerprint. Big tech,.NSA, 5 eyes won the game. No chance unless something truly citizen oriented happens in most countries.
mongol 9mo ago
I have been looking into options too. One option that seemed attractive was called Zoho mail. Any experiences from that?
- stanski 9mo ago
  Been using Zoho for years with no issues. Both via the web interface and IMAP.
- tianqi 9mo ago
  I've been using it for years and have no complaints. But some people say Zoho can even read your emails by human, I'm not sure if that's true.
josh_s 9mo ago
Single best thing I've done to get control over my public email: * add a filter that moves all email with "unsubscribe" into an "unsubscribe" folder combined with fastmail spam filtering, my inbox actually became usable again instantly...
mococa 9mo ago
I’ve migrated my main mail account (gmail) to a custom domain on apple’s icloud. No regrets (since I am a mac & iphone user). Plus, I can have a email per website, without exposing my main address.
pveierland 9mo ago
Just disabled the "Smart features" setting in Gmail. Disabling this feature force-disables these other settings: - Grammar - Spelling - Auto-correct Pretty dark UX to force users into an all AI or nothing situation. PS1: Yes, I've paid for Google One for years and I'm not just a free user. PS2: Yes, these features are entirely possible to provide without training on your specific user data.
- nunez 9mo ago
  These don't disable Gemini. You can disable it completely if you pay for Workspace, but you can also use a Hide Gemini extension to hide most pop-ups and nags.
  - xigoi 9mo ago
    It used to be that you had to buy a premium version of software to get more features, now you have to buy the premium version to disable features you don’t want…
redfloatplane 9mo ago
Since we're all posting about our favourite email provider, Purelymail has been one of my best discoveries of the last year or so. Ten dollars a year (though it's expected that price will go up) for as many mailboxes as you like. There's a webmail too in case you don't want your own IMAP client. I migrated every email I had (except an unmigrateable @gmail.com) to Purelymail over Christmas and I couldn't be happier.
- witweb 9mo ago
  Purelymail is really good. I've been using it for over 4 years now and haven't had any issues around deliverability or availability. It might not be fancy but it has almost any feature you'd want.
- reddalo 9mo ago
  I also love Purelymail. I love the fact that it's so cheap, but that also scares me, because I know it can't last forever.
- odie5533 9mo ago
  I migrated to Purelymail around the same time! It's working great for me. Unlimited domains, unlimited users, easy to setup. I'm slowly moving all my accounts over to my own domain.
- nosioptar 9mo ago
  I've had purelymail for several years. I've only had to contact support once. They responded within an hour and fixed the problem as well. I've helped nontechnical people move to purelymail as well, they all love it.
- shishcat 9mo ago
  The issue tracker seems kinda dead... for the rest, it's a good provider
aleda145 9mo ago
Been having a custom domain on Proton for almost 10 years now. No issues and I'm happy my Google sceptisism is now paying dividends
CrzyLngPwd 9mo ago
I have had gmail for decades. The best thing I did recently was turn off the smart features, add a bunch of filters, and unsubscribe from stuff I was no longer interested in. It was initially a shock to see so many emails I hadn't cared for, but an hour of curation, and it has been a delight ever since.
- reddalo 9mo ago
  I did the same, turning off all AI and smart features (including those Primary/Social/Promotion tabs) made Gmail so much better. I'm planning to move to another service provider though. I can't trust Google anymore.
palata 9mo ago
> My email is now being hosted by Microsoft, [...] Then I guess it's off to Switzerland ( https://proton.me/about https://proton.me/about ); I am all for moving away from Gmail, but I think this is completely the wrong way to do it. Why go through the hassle of changing your @gmail for @microsoft (or whatever it is?), already thinking about moving to @proton.me in the future? Get your own domain, and then you won't depend on the service provider anymore. Try Proton, or Fastmail, or Migadu, whatever you want. Once you own your domain, you can change every year while keeping the same email address (e.g. me@m24tom.com)! Note: I won't accept "it's too hard to setup a domain" from someone who spent more time writing a blog post than it would take to learn how to do it.
- nunez 9mo ago
  Moving to Fastmail from Gmail workspace was an excellent decision. Could not have been easier and I get proper push email in the Apple client.
- nosioptar 9mo ago
  First time I set up a domain with purelymail only took me about 15 minutes. It was nothing more than copy/pasting some values into DNS records and selecting the record type purelymail said to use for said values.
- woleium 9mo ago
  google hosts 1/4 of all emails. They will probably have most of your email anyway
  - goku12 9mo ago
    They never said anything about keeping their messages away from Google. It's about having some agency. One fine morning, you'll find yourself locked out of your gmail account and every other Google service because they just decided that something you said isn't politically correct. You'll also be locked out of any external thrid-party services that rely on Google's OAuth service, email 2FA or verification. You'll never find any help to restore any of that, except to write a whiny blog post and hope that it goes viral on HN or something. It's not an indignity you want to live with. Another scenario is Google changing their ToS or their service degrading (especially like their really bad spam filters these days). You don't really have a choice of migrating, because you'll have to change your email address as well. That doesn't happen when you have your own domain. If they do something wrong, you just take your domain to another provider. And all these are worth doing while your gmail is still active, because it will take a few months to migrate your third-party services and your important correspondences over to your new account. And finally, I really hate the pervasive argument and attitude on HN in the lines of "They trample on us regardless. Might as well learn to live under their feet". Why do you deny yourself self-respect like this? Even if the odds seem insurmountable, it's worth resisting the tyranny in voice and in action. And your voice is important to other people, even if you don't know it. Your defeatist attitude can influence them as much as your relentless defiance can. Choose how you want to influence the society.
hk1337 9mo ago
I've been using Fastmail for several years now, I remember when I first said something about it on here I got a negative response about how Fastmail doesn't do something correctly or something, and now most of the comment replies are praising Fastmail. I still like it, it's just interesting how fickle things are here. > My email is now being hosted by Microsoft, so hopefully will be free of the outages Ironically Microsoft just had an outage a couple of days ago.
NoboruWataya 9mo ago
My tips from moving away from Gmail: - Mailbox.org is what I use and it's pretty good. I often see Fastmail recommended too. - Use a standalone email client that allows you to connect to multiple email servers. This makes it easy to continue to monitor your old email account while you use the new one. I use Thunderbird on desktop and FairEmail on Android (though Thunderbird also has an app for Android). - Transfer all of your most important accounts over initially. As long as you continue to have access to your old account, you don't need to transfer absolutely everything all at once, you can do it over time. - Use a custom domain name so if you decide to change providers again in future you just need to update your DNS records rather than changing your email address in all your accounts. - You may also want to set up a catch-all email address or use a service like https://addy.io/ https://addy.io/ to generate email aliases on the fly, and create a new alias for each service you use (for example, your email for GitHub could be github.com@mydomain.com). This helps protect your actual personal email address from spam.
snowchaser 9mo ago
As a PSA, the Google Workspace version of gmail doesn’t train on your data, if you like other gmail/workspace features. (Workspace TOS is now part of the Cloud TOS https://workspace.google.com/terms/premier_terms/ https://workspace.google.com/terms/premier_terms/) Section 12.11 of the Workspace specific terms confirms that Google will not train on customer data(which Gmail emails in workspace are). Incidentally, this is where Generative prompts and responses submitted or created via GA versions of Gemini in workspace are identified as “Customer Data”, which is not used for training. https://workspace.google.com/terms/service-terms/ https://workspace.google.com/terms/service-terms/
sylens 9mo ago
I thought this post was building towards talking about switching to self hosted email or Fastmail or Proton, but they went to Microsoft of all places? All of this garbage is coming to Outlook.com sooner or later
jsnell 9mo ago
> BUT... now... what they are saying is that... we are going to use your email to train our LLMs. I feel I'm missing some part of the story. Where are they saying that?
lzy 9mo ago
I’ve been running CheapestEmailHosting.com - email hosting for custom domains without enterprise pricing. SMTP/IMAP/POP3, webmail (Roundcube), CalDAV/CardDAV, unlimited mailboxes, catch-all. Starting at $5/year for 2GB. No marketing spend, and I terminate spammers immediately. If you run a legitimate domain, you subsidize yourself. This isn’t for bulk senders or SLAs. It’s for developers and side-project founders who can configure their own clients and don’t want to pay $60-120/year. https://www.cheapestemailhosting.com https://www.cheapestemailhosting.com
dubious2 9mo ago
want to really know about email? I found this https://digdeeper.club/articles/email.xhtml https://digdeeper.club/articles/email.xhtml
xnx 9mo ago
Could also use GMail through IMAP, right?
tklenke 9mo ago
It's a bit unfortunate that this turned into a discussion of email hosting alternatives. The real scream in to the void is the force feeding of AI into places were it's not wanted by the user. Also missed is the discussion of is it okay to use or personal information to train models. It's one thing to scrape this discussion (it's public) To me it's another to scrape my personal conversations... I trust Google, MSFT, AMZN to more or less do their best to keep information private (e.g. Google Voice, Alexa) But once it's in a model, they have no idea what can leak out.
kkfx 9mo ago
I'm on my mail since year BUT the issue is that most mail tools came from another era, nice for us, but not really usable for most people. My setup include notmuch as MUA, muchsync to have messages via ssh on some machines, MailDrop to auto-refile them and keep my inboxes clean enough. Generally speaking it's not that hard, but the need of many components and the absence of a shiny UI for end users makes their use a no go even for many generic GNU/Linux user. Most development since to many years is only on WebMails that's the issue.
BAHKA 8mo ago
> My email is now being hosted by Microsoft, so hopefully will be free of the outages and limits some of you have experienced with that email in the past. I don’t even know where to begin with this...

142 points by tklenke 9mo ago

Recently I was surprised to see a Google Gemini summary at the top of my email on my phone. A day or two later this appeared in my web client as well. Look, I love our new overlords (for the record m'lords I nearly always use please and thank you. I was an early adopter. I still am a frequent user..I mean someone who has all the answers and blows smoke up my ass..perfect right! Despite that, it appears it's not good for me (https://www.media.mit.edu/publications/your-brain-on-chatgpt/ https://www.media.mit.edu/publications/your-brain-on-chatgpt...) It's great, it's easy, makes me feel good in the moment..of course it's bad for me! Here's the thing. I like to read things from my friends that they have taken the time to write. I personally hate texting. All the nuance is gone. Often the humor. Sad. Makes me want to have a beer with you...eye contact...blech. The LAST thing I want is a summary...at the top of the email...highlighted..that I CANNOT turn off. I tried to turn it off. I can. It's under `Gmail -> Settings -> General -> Smart Features (checkbox)`. BUT..the AI summaries is now grouped with the Smart Tabs. For those of you who do not use Gmail Smart Tabs, Smart Tabs (officially the Tabbed Inbox) have been part of Gmail since 2013; well actually the technology behind them—Smart Labels—actually debuted two years earlier. (Thank you Gemini, yes I DO truly love you. Tell me again about the comparisons of Stephen Miller and Heinrich Himmler's tactics please?) Smart Tabs automatically sort my incoming flood of solicited commercial email (cue laughter from those who know my first start-up) into five buckets: * Primary: Email from you. * Promotions: K&L Wine Merchants at the top of the list. * Social: Hi Andrew on Facebook (that I only log into from Firefox running on a VM). * Update: Actual transactional emails from companies. * Forums: The Information at the top of the list (a newsletter I'd like to read but don't want to make the time justify paying for the content). I tried turning off Smart Features and oh my, that's not usable. So I lived with the AI summary at the top. For a week. Then this morning, I saw several messages in my Primary tab that normally get sorted into Promotions, Social, Updates or Forums. This is not unheard of; sometimes a company uses a new incoming address or something and stuff gets put in the wrong bucket. But THIS time, I got a popup that says I must "Share" this message with Google and links to the Privacy Policy and Google Terms of Service. And an explicit sentence: "Messages and attachments might be reviewed by humans, so don't share any sensitive or confidential information." I'm not naive. I'm an early adopter, my email address includes my name and no numbers. I AM a direct marketer. From the get-go, having Google read my email in order to provide targeted advertising was part of the deal. I was fine with that. BUT...now...what they are saying is that...we are going to use your email to train our LLMs. I'm not okay with that. That knowledge of my way of writing, my personal details, my confidential commercial information is NOT okay to use to train your models. 'Cause I expect mistakes will be made and more information will reside in the model than those at Google (or FB, MSFT etc) intended. And I'm not really up for assuming that risk. So...goodbye Gmail. It's been great. Really great. I'm sure I'll miss you. Bye. My email is now being hosted by Microsoft, so hopefully will be free of the outages and limits some of you have experienced with that email in the past. There it will reside until I cannot turn off MSFT's ability to read my email. Then I guess it's off to Switzerland ( [https://proton.me/about https://proton.me/about](https://proton.me/about https://proton.me/about) ); my email can be with my gold. JK. Tom p.s. why thank you Gemini for reformatting that for me into a clean, engaging markdown blog post. Yes, I do agree this is a sharp, timely take on the "AI-ification" of tools we use every day. I love you. Kill me last?

CTOSian 9mo ago
you can use your gmail on zoho, they have some low cost plans
- mapontosevenths 9mo ago
  How will that prevent google from training AI's on his data?
  - CTOSian 9mo ago
    no idea, do they really read any darn email on storage, or just when you use their webmail/android app?
shawn_w 9mo ago
Other long-time features are now tied to having those stupid summaries enabled too. It's an all or nothing deal. So frustrating and unnecessary.
- B1FIDO 9mo ago
  Speaking of botched LLM summaries, my bank has been doing this to me for several months now. Instead of the transaction info which is strictly defined and uniformly formatted, they've attempted to give "friendly names" to each one and "simplify" the descriptions. This has been a supremely bad idea. Firstly, it deprives me of essential info about each transaction, which I cannot access at all in the mobile app. I need to go into the website on a desktop computer, click through a few screens to say "this description is incorrect!" and request that they show me the original. The "simple descriptions" elide a lot of useful info, such as the vendor's phone number. Sometimes they are completely incorrect, like the name of my church gets a completely different and misleading name in every transaction. I cannot disable this. Last year, there was a transaction during tax time that I believed to be some sort of penalty by the government, and I was freaking out about it, but it turned out to actually be my refund and had been "helpfully renamed" by my bank to be extremely misleading. I have discussed these issues with the online support staff, and in person at my branch, and they are sympathetic, but there is nothing they can do about the app, and the only workaround for me is to individually flag each transaction as it comes in, and fix it, and there is no "global disable" or "global unfuck everything" button for any of us, anywhere.

throwaway2056 9mo ago

> I tried turning off Smart Features and oh my, that's not usable. Why? What did it do? This is the problem. Overload. It is not a google problem. If you get 200 emails - even without AI - just by using Thunderbird or k9mail (android) it will be a problem. edit: https://support.google.com/mail/answer/15604322?hl=en https://support.google.com/mail/answer/15604322?hl=en I cannot find that "Messages and attachments might be reviewed by humans, so don't share any sensitive or confidential information." anywhere. Of course, there is nothing wrong about changing the provider. Variety is good.

B1FIDO 9mo ago
I had Smart Features enabled for years. Years! They worked okay. They put good accurate stuff on my calendar and so there was useful work being done by the AI in background. Unfortunately, in the past few months, Gemini AI really started shoving its way in. And there were some features that were really unpalatable, that were basically dealbreakers for this. Yeah, I believe the "AI Summaries" had a lot to do with it. They were bad, misleading, and I did not want them crowding up my app. I couldn't disable those features without disabling Smart Features entirely. So that's what I did. So now I sort of suffer without the automatic email event-calendar integrations, and the other cool stuff that AI had provided, but it's totally usable. I have no trouble using it as an email service with that AI disabled. It works fine. Anyway, it is no secret that Google has always used the text of our emails for their own marketing and analysis purposes. Always has. Why did you think Gmail was a free service? Obviously, you were paying for it! We all paid for it with our email content!
tim333 9mo ago
I've been a gmail user without smart features for years. I'm guessing the 'not usable' was too much junk drowning out important messages. The answer usually is spending 5 minutes clicking 'unsubscribe' on the stuff you are not bothered about.

sodapopcan 9mo ago

It would have been nicer if this was about a general Google boycott in general, but this will do too.

throw7 9mo ago

"My email is now being hosted by Microsoft..." Out of the pan, into the fire. my recommendation: i've been happily using fastmail for years.

andrewchilds 9mo ago
Maybe it’s just me, but I have serious issue with Fastmail’s spam filtering. Meaning, it seems that I am the spam filter. I find myself considering closing the account on a regular basis because of it. I am also extremely frustrated with Gmail’s AI features now being apparently impossible to disable.
- rationalist 9mo ago
  Fastmail's spam filter has been better than Gmail's spam filter in my experience.
- tamimio 9mo ago
  Thier spam filter is really great, probably only one time they flagged a legit email as a spam. On the other hand, the email I have that uses fastmail never ended in someone’s spam.
- sph 9mo ago
  > Fastmail’s spam filtering I had issues with it early on, and after some back and forth with support they explained to me what is going on: it takes about 200 spam emails before your personalized filter kicks in, before that you might see something slip through. Also, the spam filter updates after you delete emails from your spam folder. Just remember to empty your spam folder, and add some custom rules until you reach that 200 threshold. 5+ years in, everything is working great, nothing to complain, best email provider I've ever used. I only wish they had servers in the EU.
  - aeurielesn 9mo ago
    This has been my number one request for fastmail for years. They're happy with GDPR compliance but no intentions of having EU servers.

codingjoe 9mo ago

#di_day #ccc ;)

zahlman 9mo ago
... What does this mean in the current context?

latchkey 9mo ago

I'm very happy with MimeStream. I get gmail, without the UX of gmail, and something that I can command-tab into, instead of a browser window.

nelsonfigueroa 9mo ago
Looked up Mimestream. So it's a subscription-based app that basically gives you nicer UI/UX for your google emails. Oof.
- latchkey 9mo ago
  $50/year for a nice app that I use on a daily basis to make my life better? Worth every penny.
  - noitpmeder 9mo ago
    But google still is presumably still training their AIs on your email content regardless if you don't use their frontend.
    - latchkey 9mo ago
      OPs issue was more clearly directed at "A week or two ago I was surprised to see a Google Gemini summary at the top of my email on my phone", which Mimestream doesn't include. The rest of the complaint was about a bug that happened, just today, with sorting and spam control.
      - noitpmeder 9mo ago
        OP meaning the author of the linked article? Maybe I missed the mark but I felt his main rejection of Gmail ended up being because they train their AI based on his private and or commercial data.
        latchkey 9mo ago

r0b05 9mo ago

Is it easy and advisable to host your own email server on vps?

rationalist 9mo ago
I am no expert, but from what I've read... Easy: I don't think so. Advisable: Hell no. I believe you have to constantly maintain it, and good luck with deliverability. Anyone: correct me if I'm wrong.
- nine_k 9mo ago
  Not an expert, but I suppose that you can safely receive email using a self-hosted SMTP server. Sending it without being blacklisted / greylisted is trickier. If you don't want to muck with obtaining an IPv4 with a good karma, there are options to send via large providers, such as GMail (IIRC free), or AWS SES, or things like Sendgrid or Brevo. The latter may be effectively free if you send only a handful of emails per day.
  - technothrasher 9mo ago
    I found when I tried out using SES, Sendgrid, Brevo, etc to send emails for my self-hosted exim instance, that my deliverability actually went down compared to sending the mail directly. I believe it was because for the free/low cost tiers they dump you onto IP addresses where they're also playing wack-a-mole with spammers. SMTP2GO was the only one I found that had decent deliverability at a free/low cost for low volumes. Still, I only use it for my personal email. For my business, I host our mail on Fastmail.
- sdoering 9mo ago
  I host a few client marketing & transactional mails. Mostly sending stuff from marketing automation/newsletter software. Not an issue. Will be migrating the first few domains of off paid google workspace E-Mail to a self hosted solution. I actually don’t expect too much trouble. But that’s currently still a hypothesis. I have seen a few people do that successfully. So I know it’s possible. Still. Not having hosted a mail infrastructure in 20 odd years…

nine_k 9mo ago

OK, while I briefly have a bit of your attention: what would you advise to use instead? What I need: * Server-side filters. * Tags. No, not folders. Many of my emails have 2-3 tags, some have 4-5. I wonder if it can even map to IMAP4; I see a few ways to model it. * Good deliverability. * Reasonable spam protection. * Not hugely expensive. Ideally near-free, or self-hosted. What are some options?

sph 9mo ago
I've been spamming enough about Fastmail (just a happy user), it ticks all your boxes except near-free/self-hosted. Re: tags, you can switch between classic folders or Gmail-style labels. Re: filtering, it has an easy-to-use UI but you can write your own custom Sieve filtering rules if you want.
em-bee 9mo ago
is there any FOSS based webmail and/or IMAP that supports tagging instead of folders? i use supmua (which inspired notmuch) which like gmail uses tags instead of folders. i could not go back to a folder based system. but i am really missing a webmail interface that works with tags.
eviks 9mo ago
> * Tags. No, not folders. Why not both?

puttycat 9mo ago

I have more than 20 years of email in my gmail account. How do I even start migrating? And even if I migrate, I will need to keep my address alive and forwarding to my new address at least for a few years. So no privacy gains there either. Does anyone have concrete advice as to how to make the transition?

bryogenic 9mo ago
- Start with takeout - Setup automatic forwarding - Then probably just use that old email for searching old emails This has worked okay for me
arrsingh 9mo ago
I was in the same boat as you. I tried Fastmail and they have a really great tool that just did it. I was skeptical but after I tried it was very pleased. Give it a shot.
sodapopcan 9mo ago
> I will need to keep my address alive and forwarding to my new address at least for a few years. So no privacy gains there either. Ya, there's no way of not letting google know what your new address is, but you're going to be emailing a lot of gmail addresses anyway so there's no way around that, really. But with the forwarding they only know incoming mail. I switched off gmail 3.5 years ago and all I can say is that it wasn't anywhere near as scary as I thought it would be. I setup an auto-responder that would hound people to update their contacts for me and slowly switched over services I cared about (and closed others!) An important point, though, is that I don't really care about old emails. I do still have access to my gmail account, of course, but I have yet to go back. Surely there is a way to export everything and import it into something searchable, though?
nicholasjarnold 9mo ago
Fastmail provides an easy way to migrate [0]. I setup a label in my Fastmail account that will tag all mail coming in from Gmail. Then you go through that list at your leisure and make the requisite contact with the people or services emailing at the old address. It's really not difficult at all. I've been on Fastmail for ~4 years now, and haven't once considered looking back or regretted it. Good luck. [0] https://www.fastmail.com/features/migrate/ https://www.fastmail.com/features/migrate/

Foorack 9mo ago

Both me and partner switching to Infomaniak (also Swiss), can recommend. Not E2E encrypted, but kMail is more usable than ProtonMail (also a lot cheaper on all levels). Been using ProtonMail for 5 years but so annoying I can't propely search my emails because of the encryption, can't use standard IMAP without a proprietary connector, and their Drives/Docs suite is missing a lot of features.

whyagaindavid 9mo ago
Account creation needs phone number?

arrsingh 9mo ago

I moved my custom domain from google workspace to fastmail a few years ago and didn't look back. Very happy with that decision. The only two downsides: 1. A few people have reported my emails from fastmail (calendar invites mostly) going to their spam folder. Not enough reports so I'm not worried. 2. Google won't let me sign in and create / edit /comment in google docs with my custom email hosted at fastmail so I have to have a random@gmail.com account just to use free google docs to collaborate with people who only send me google docs. Overall I think AI features are going to be great but give me the ability to pick and choose which I enable / disable and we should be good. If not then I agree with OP - Bye Bye Gmail. oh, and don't read my emails and protect my privacy google! - no? Ok bye bye!

ofalkaed 9mo ago

Awhile ago when I logged in to my gmail account I was asked if I wanted to try AI summaries, I clicked "no" and nothing has changed in my user experience in either the web interface or mobile apps. It also told me I could that I could enable or disable AI features with the Gemini icon next to the settings icon, which it looks like I can still do, at least in the web interface. Am I missing something? Being "an early adopter" is not proof of anything other than being an early adopter.

whyagaindavid 9mo ago

https://mako.cc/copyrighteous/google-has-most-of-my-email-because-it-has-all-of-yours https://mako.cc/copyrighteous/google-has-most-of-my-email-be... Sure. Google Has Most of My Email Because It Has All of Yours

stonogo 9mo ago
I’m not sure what to do except encourage others to consider, in the wake of the Snowden revelations and everything else, whether you really want Google to have all your email. And half of mine. Looks like this article and the one you're replying to are in agreement.
- coffe2mug 9mo ago
  Many businesses use office365 or Google. They then have all your email. Fingerprint. Big tech,.NSA, 5 eyes won the game. No chance unless something truly citizen oriented happens in most countries.

mongol 9mo ago

I have been looking into options too. One option that seemed attractive was called Zoho mail. Any experiences from that?

stanski 9mo ago
Been using Zoho for years with no issues. Both via the web interface and IMAP.
tianqi 9mo ago
I've been using it for years and have no complaints. But some people say Zoho can even read your emails by human, I'm not sure if that's true.

josh_s 9mo ago

Single best thing I've done to get control over my public email: * add a filter that moves all email with "unsubscribe" into an "unsubscribe" folder combined with fastmail spam filtering, my inbox actually became usable again instantly...

mococa 9mo ago

I’ve migrated my main mail account (gmail) to a custom domain on apple’s icloud. No regrets (since I am a mac & iphone user). Plus, I can have a email per website, without exposing my main address.

pveierland 9mo ago

Just disabled the "Smart features" setting in Gmail. Disabling this feature force-disables these other settings: - Grammar - Spelling - Auto-correct Pretty dark UX to force users into an all AI or nothing situation. PS1: Yes, I've paid for Google One for years and I'm not just a free user. PS2: Yes, these features are entirely possible to provide without training on your specific user data.

nunez 9mo ago
These don't disable Gemini. You can disable it completely if you pay for Workspace, but you can also use a Hide Gemini extension to hide most pop-ups and nags.
- xigoi 9mo ago
  It used to be that you had to buy a premium version of software to get more features, now you have to buy the premium version to disable features you don’t want…

redfloatplane 9mo ago

Since we're all posting about our favourite email provider, Purelymail has been one of my best discoveries of the last year or so. Ten dollars a year (though it's expected that price will go up) for as many mailboxes as you like. There's a webmail too in case you don't want your own IMAP client. I migrated every email I had (except an unmigrateable @gmail.com) to Purelymail over Christmas and I couldn't be happier.

witweb 9mo ago
Purelymail is really good. I've been using it for over 4 years now and haven't had any issues around deliverability or availability. It might not be fancy but it has almost any feature you'd want.
reddalo 9mo ago
I also love Purelymail. I love the fact that it's so cheap, but that also scares me, because I know it can't last forever.
odie5533 9mo ago
I migrated to Purelymail around the same time! It's working great for me. Unlimited domains, unlimited users, easy to setup. I'm slowly moving all my accounts over to my own domain.
nosioptar 9mo ago
I've had purelymail for several years. I've only had to contact support once. They responded within an hour and fixed the problem as well. I've helped nontechnical people move to purelymail as well, they all love it.
shishcat 9mo ago
The issue tracker seems kinda dead... for the rest, it's a good provider

aleda145 9mo ago

Been having a custom domain on Proton for almost 10 years now. No issues and I'm happy my Google sceptisism is now paying dividends

CrzyLngPwd 9mo ago

I have had gmail for decades. The best thing I did recently was turn off the smart features, add a bunch of filters, and unsubscribe from stuff I was no longer interested in. It was initially a shock to see so many emails I hadn't cared for, but an hour of curation, and it has been a delight ever since.

reddalo 9mo ago
I did the same, turning off all AI and smart features (including those Primary/Social/Promotion tabs) made Gmail so much better. I'm planning to move to another service provider though. I can't trust Google anymore.

palata 9mo ago

> My email is now being hosted by Microsoft, [...] Then I guess it's off to Switzerland ( https://proton.me/about https://proton.me/about ); I am all for moving away from Gmail, but I think this is completely the wrong way to do it. Why go through the hassle of changing your @gmail for @microsoft (or whatever it is?), already thinking about moving to @proton.me in the future? Get your own domain, and then you won't depend on the service provider anymore. Try Proton, or Fastmail, or Migadu, whatever you want. Once you own your domain, you can change every year while keeping the same email address (e.g. me@m24tom.com)! Note: I won't accept "it's too hard to setup a domain" from someone who spent more time writing a blog post than it would take to learn how to do it.

nunez 9mo ago
Moving to Fastmail from Gmail workspace was an excellent decision. Could not have been easier and I get proper push email in the Apple client.
nosioptar 9mo ago
First time I set up a domain with purelymail only took me about 15 minutes. It was nothing more than copy/pasting some values into DNS records and selecting the record type purelymail said to use for said values.
woleium 9mo ago
google hosts 1/4 of all emails. They will probably have most of your email anyway
- goku12 9mo ago
  They never said anything about keeping their messages away from Google. It's about having some agency. One fine morning, you'll find yourself locked out of your gmail account and every other Google service because they just decided that something you said isn't politically correct. You'll also be locked out of any external thrid-party services that rely on Google's OAuth service, email 2FA or verification. You'll never find any help to restore any of that, except to write a whiny blog post and hope that it goes viral on HN or something. It's not an indignity you want to live with. Another scenario is Google changing their ToS or their service degrading (especially like their really bad spam filters these days). You don't really have a choice of migrating, because you'll have to change your email address as well. That doesn't happen when you have your own domain. If they do something wrong, you just take your domain to another provider. And all these are worth doing while your gmail is still active, because it will take a few months to migrate your third-party services and your important correspondences over to your new account. And finally, I really hate the pervasive argument and attitude on HN in the lines of "They trample on us regardless. Might as well learn to live under their feet". Why do you deny yourself self-respect like this? Even if the odds seem insurmountable, it's worth resisting the tyranny in voice and in action. And your voice is important to other people, even if you don't know it. Your defeatist attitude can influence them as much as your relentless defiance can. Choose how you want to influence the society.

hk1337 9mo ago

I've been using Fastmail for several years now, I remember when I first said something about it on here I got a negative response about how Fastmail doesn't do something correctly or something, and now most of the comment replies are praising Fastmail. I still like it, it's just interesting how fickle things are here. > My email is now being hosted by Microsoft, so hopefully will be free of the outages Ironically Microsoft just had an outage a couple of days ago.

NoboruWataya 9mo ago

My tips from moving away from Gmail: - Mailbox.org is what I use and it's pretty good. I often see Fastmail recommended too. - Use a standalone email client that allows you to connect to multiple email servers. This makes it easy to continue to monitor your old email account while you use the new one. I use Thunderbird on desktop and FairEmail on Android (though Thunderbird also has an app for Android). - Transfer all of your most important accounts over initially. As long as you continue to have access to your old account, you don't need to transfer absolutely everything all at once, you can do it over time. - Use a custom domain name so if you decide to change providers again in future you just need to update your DNS records rather than changing your email address in all your accounts. - You may also want to set up a catch-all email address or use a service like https://addy.io/ https://addy.io/ to generate email aliases on the fly, and create a new alias for each service you use (for example, your email for GitHub could be github.com@mydomain.com). This helps protect your actual personal email address from spam.

snowchaser 9mo ago

As a PSA, the Google Workspace version of gmail doesn’t train on your data, if you like other gmail/workspace features. (Workspace TOS is now part of the Cloud TOS https://workspace.google.com/terms/premier_terms/ https://workspace.google.com/terms/premier_terms/) Section 12.11 of the Workspace specific terms confirms that Google will not train on customer data(which Gmail emails in workspace are). Incidentally, this is where Generative prompts and responses submitted or created via GA versions of Gemini in workspace are identified as “Customer Data”, which is not used for training. https://workspace.google.com/terms/service-terms/ https://workspace.google.com/terms/service-terms/

sylens 9mo ago

I thought this post was building towards talking about switching to self hosted email or Fastmail or Proton, but they went to Microsoft of all places? All of this garbage is coming to Outlook.com sooner or later

jsnell 9mo ago

> BUT... now... what they are saying is that... we are going to use your email to train our LLMs. I feel I'm missing some part of the story. Where are they saying that?

lzy 9mo ago

I’ve been running CheapestEmailHosting.com - email hosting for custom domains without enterprise pricing. SMTP/IMAP/POP3, webmail (Roundcube), CalDAV/CardDAV, unlimited mailboxes, catch-all. Starting at $5/year for 2GB. No marketing spend, and I terminate spammers immediately. If you run a legitimate domain, you subsidize yourself. This isn’t for bulk senders or SLAs. It’s for developers and side-project founders who can configure their own clients and don’t want to pay $60-120/year. https://www.cheapestemailhosting.com https://www.cheapestemailhosting.com

dubious2 9mo ago

want to really know about email? I found this https://digdeeper.club/articles/email.xhtml https://digdeeper.club/articles/email.xhtml

xnx 9mo ago

Could also use GMail through IMAP, right?

tklenke 9mo ago

It's a bit unfortunate that this turned into a discussion of email hosting alternatives. The real scream in to the void is the force feeding of AI into places were it's not wanted by the user. Also missed is the discussion of is it okay to use or personal information to train models. It's one thing to scrape this discussion (it's public) To me it's another to scrape my personal conversations... I trust Google, MSFT, AMZN to more or less do their best to keep information private (e.g. Google Voice, Alexa) But once it's in a model, they have no idea what can leak out.

kkfx 9mo ago

I'm on my mail since year BUT the issue is that most mail tools came from another era, nice for us, but not really usable for most people. My setup include notmuch as MUA, muchsync to have messages via ssh on some machines, MailDrop to auto-refile them and keep my inboxes clean enough. Generally speaking it's not that hard, but the need of many components and the absence of a shiny UI for end users makes their use a no go even for many generic GNU/Linux user. Most development since to many years is only on WebMails that's the issue.

BAHKA 8mo ago

> My email is now being hosted by Microsoft, so hopefully will be free of the outages and limits some of you have experienced with that email in the past. I don’t even know where to begin with this...