21 ms·
Gmail thinks I'm stupid, so I left
- hparadiz 5mo agoDeath by a thousand cuts.
- franze 5mo agoDeath by a thousand OKRs.
- kordlessagain 5mo agoLinkedIn (the company not the other users) thinks I'm stupid, so I also left it.
- franze 5mo agoI love LinkedIn. Its the world biggest art project, mirroring all the trivialities of our work life and business bigotry right back into our faces in an endless feedback loop. Art, I tell you, its art. Now with AI.
- bostik 5mo agoThe problem? Life imitates art.
- antonvs 5mo agoThat description would make for a good definition of “anti-art”. Which also describes the output of LLMs.
- rurp 5mo agoI avoided Linkedin for many years before finally breaking down and signing up while job hunting. If you had shown me the actual feed content out of context and asked if it was real or satire I would have guessed satire. So much of the content that gets posted is such an absurd cliche it's self-parodying.
- rsynnott 5mo agoThe fascinating thing about LinkedIn is how little LLMs have changed it; even before LLMs, most LinkedIn content was written is that awful inane botslop style.
- Henchman21 5mo agoSays something important about the people writing that stuff, doesn’t it?
- computerjoe314 5mo agoThe problem is that everybody is told they need to have LinkedIn to get a job in the current market. My college's career department told me I was not going to succeed without it, so I reluctantly created a profile. But I don't want to have one!
- macintux 5mo agoI really hope Apple watches what Google and Microsoft are doing with AI, specifically shoving it into their customers' workflow without invitation, and steers far away from that path.
- Wingman4l7 5mo agoApple? The company that has built its entire brand and product lines around "we know what's best for you and if you don't like the way we've done it, you're wrong"?
- Forgeties79 5mo agoYou’re not wrong but so far they’re one of the only major companies in their cohort that isn’t shoving AI down our throats/integrating it into literally everything and begging us to use it with some embarrassing corporate plea. Opting out of Siri is incredibly easy and there are no major features i care about that decision locks me out of. I think it has some impacts on CarPlay but it’s never stopped me from being able to put on music for my kids or whatever. Frankly I forget I’ve opted out all the time because they never bug me to start using it.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- platevoltage 5mo agoI hear you on this. All I hear is how behind Apple is with AI. More and more I'm feeling like thats a feature not a bug.
- xp84 5mo agoLet's not pretend that fact is anything but a happy accident, though. The only reason AI has been practically scrubbed from their website is to try to make us forget the time they preannounced fantastically brilliant AI capabilities and then delivered less than nothing -- not even fixing Siri, which is the obvious #1 product in the world that needs to be rebuilt on LLMs.
- apparent 5mo agoWhat surprises me most about gmail and AI is that they seem really quite bad at filtering out obvious spam. I get so many messages from people I have never heard from, on relatively new domains, with endings like "if this isn't relevant for you right now, say "not now" and I'll not circle back" (a clear attempt to allow unsubscribe without using the word). How is it that they haven't figured out how to stop these messages from getting through? I'm at the point that I'm considering those email services that require the sender to confirm they're human before an email is delivered. It would be a hassle to people I communicate with (once), but the ongoing hassle to me is sizable enough that I'm considering it.
- gowld 5mo agoMaybe it's much more targeted small-scale message sends, not millions of messages. Do you want Google to block all mail to you relatively new domains?
- stonogo 5mo agoThe frustrating part is the seem to do that already, except for these obvious spam messages.
- zamadatix 5mo ago> a clear attempt to allow unsubscribe without using the word I would have assumed it was primarily an attempt at getting you to verify the address is a real, monitored inbox. I guess it's probably a 2 birds with one stone kind of thing, lie about a way to unsubscribe to get off the spam filter and mark the email as a prime target for other domains.
- n-barraclough 5mo agoI think there might be a small domain reputation boost to having you reply. Email providers score your domain on reply rates sometimes, as well as open rates & whether you're marked as spam.
- glaslong 5mo ago
- HoldOnAMinute 5mo ago"Lie to people who want to be lied to, and you’ll get rich." Also known as Promo-Driven Culture
- rationalist 5mo ago> There are three ways to make a living: > 1) Lie to people who want to be lied to, and you’ll get rich. > 2) Tell the truth to those who want the truth, and you’ll make a living. > 3) Tell the truth to those who want to be lied to, and you’ll go broke. That's depressing. [0] https://jasonzweig.com/three-ways-to-get-paid/ https://jasonzweig.com/three-ways-to-get-paid/
- etiam 5mo agoThree Ways to Get Paid (2018) (jasonzweig.com) is over here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48373054 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48373054
- Eisenstein 5mo agoIs this a test feature? I don't see it in my gmail.
- maupin 5mo agoSame. I haven't seen this. And I hope I never do unless I specifically click a button to enable it.
- fantasizr 5mo agoI've pretty much avoided it by going to Gmail->Settings and disabling "smart" features: Smart Reply: (Show suggested replies when available.) Smart features: When you turn this setting on, you agree to let Gmail, Chat, and Meet use your content and activity in these products to provide smart features and personalize your experience.
- triMichael 5mo agoWhile I haven't had this issue with Gmail, I recently got a new computer and the first two weeks for full of moments like this. It's shocking to me how much we've let popups go rampant on everything. Perhaps the worst offender is Windows update, as it won't even let you use your own computer without clicking through 10 screens refusing all sorts of products they are trying to push on you.
- coldpie 5mo agoI know everyone's tired of hearing this, but this doesn't happen on Linux. I know I know, it's different and a little janky here and there and maybe you have to find a replacement for one or two pieces of software. But like, you don't actually have to put up with this. There is a better way.
- Our_Benefactors 5mo ago[flagged]
- szundi 5mo agoTrick is to use the newest distro release with previous cycle hardware
- happymellon 5mo agoAs someone who uses more than one monitor, my Mac has far more issues than my Linux boxes.
- dreamcompiler 5mo agoSame here. What frustrates me is that Apple pretty much invented seamless multiple monitor integration back in the early 90s, but the Apple of today has either forgotten how to do it or they just don't care.
- smohare 5mo agoHuh, I’ve never once had a problem with multiple monitors and macs over the last 15 years. But at most I’m running two monitors.
- drnick1 5mo agoAs someone who hosts their own email, I dislike Gmail as much as anyone. But your issue is this: > I go to check my email in Gmail’s web UI.
- xp84 5mo agoGmail has three main features that matter (to me at least) -- and they are huge, very important features. And as much as I don't like this fact, using their official web or mobile clients are the only way to get them: 1. Accurate, deterministic, fast search of your email 2. Whatever they call the categorized inbox, I use "Primary," "Promotions," and "Updates." 3. Labels implemented as labels, not mapped clumsily onto the "Folder" concept. If I were told I had to not use the Gmail UI, I would 100% switch to another email provider immediately, as using Gmail the service with a vanilla IMAP client is way worse than just using a normal email host with the same.
- drnick1 5mo agoThunderbird works well for my needs. I just want to see my emails categorized in reverse chronological order. I don't expect or want any kind of filtering; I would just Sieve filters for that (running on my own server). Perhaps I am just old fashioned. Should I want AI assistance to write an email, I would fire up a local model such as GPT-OSS. Local models are more than capable for trivial tasks like this, and a smaller model on CPU only would also work.
- efreak 5mo ago3 is a result of Gmail's imap implementation, and can be squarely blamed on Google. They did this intentionally. Instead of mapping the your tags as imap labels, they mapped them as a folder structure. While it certainly shouldn't be necessary, I do feel like it should be possible to work around this in a mail client, however; don't emails these days all have unique ids? If not, storing a hash of the message content+headers/timestamps for every message should be enough to keep a local index of what each message is tagged as (given the implementation where each message shows up in multiple places). I can somewhat understand Thunderbird not wanting to make compatibility shims for specific vendors poor implementations.
- adjejmxbdjdn 5mo agoI setup lieer and notmuch with an alot front end which was the first time I was able to get my Gmail inbox under control. Unfortunately, I’m not up for learning a completely new set of keyboard shortcuts anymore and alot doesn’t provide a nice interface either, so i don’t use it much more. But the enshittification of mail is dismaying.
- kgwxd 5mo agoEven Clippy had more respect for the user: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_Assistant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_Assistant
- pdpi 5mo ago> “Tab to improve”. What I’ve written so far isn’t up to Gmail’s standards, it seems. I find this infuriating. I have my own voice, my own writing style, and I deliberately use some "bad" writing tropes for effect. For any non-trivial amount of writing (read: anything with actual paragraphs), I'm liable to spend as much time editing as I am writing out the first draft, to make sure my writing conveys the message I want it to. "Tab to improve" is, effectively, "tab to delete my own personality".
- metalliqaz 5mo agoSomehow MS Word's grammar check does this without being offensive about it.
- kgwxd 5mo agoSeems silly to upend your entire account. Just use a different email client. Email protocol was designed specifically so you could do that, anytime you want.
- platevoltage 5mo agoMost of the reason why I still use Gmail is because IMAP is free. Otherwise I'd be on Protonmail.
- lpolovets 5mo agoRelated to this, I hate how aggressively Google pushes Gemini and all of the privacy implications involved with that. 1) Lots of features got moved around and there are now many "Write with AI", "Generate image with AI", etc buttons polluting user interfaces even though I don't use them and don't want to use them. 2) Actually, I would use some of these features if I didn't have to do a full opt-in to Smart Features for Google Workspace. If I'm writing a blog post and want to generate a cat picture, that doesn't mean I want to turn on invasive AI-enhanced features in every Google App under the sun. Gemini's chat interface is similar from I can tell: either I can see my search history but Google can train off of it, or if I don't want Google to train off of my chats then I can turn History off but then I can't view it myself. Why isn't there an option for me to see my history but not Google?? They're just the worst at caring about UX.
- fellowniusmonk 5mo agoAt least they reverted the shitty mobile Keep integration that was not only an insanely distracting UI but made the whole interface laggy as hell.
- rjh29 5mo agoThey've always been this way. I think until recently Google Maps would refuse to save your home address unless you enabled location history, so you had to type it in every time.
- tartoran 5mo agoI chose typing every time.
- trvz 5mo agoAnd I chose to set a browser bookmark with the corresponding GET parameters.
- embedding-shape 5mo ago
- SV_BubbleTime 5mo ago> The message you’re sending is that you think I’m not capable of reading and writing my own emails. I mean… this is probably true for a great number of people. Perhaps the majority and they are statistically correct to assume. But yes, fuck Gmail pushing this shit so hard by default.
- masfuerte 5mo agoMy Mother received an email from her supermarket confirming her delivery date. It said they were coming tomorrow morning while she was out. She'd just made the booking for a completely different day so she couldn't understand it. She is very old and this confusion made her think her mental decline had accelerated. She was quite distressed. I looked at her gmail (I don't use it) and it took me a moment to realise I wasn't looking at the email. I was looking at an AI summary of it, and it was completely wrong. The only important information in the message was the delivery date, and the AI had hallucinated a different one. So I disabled the AI features. But I do wonder how many people have, for example, missed job interviews or funerals because of this bullshit. Google has utter contempt for their users.
- tartoran 5mo agoYeah, this is infuriating indeed. If we wanted to use halfbaked AI we'd know where to find it. But shoving it instead of the real thing is extremely annoying. I remember Google+ fiasco, trying to shove their + everywhere. It didn't go well for Google+.
- jacobgkau 5mo agoHeck, I order pizzas online regularly (one of the only types of account I haven't migrated off to other email addresses, because it's not very important), and my ASAP pick-up orders usually get an "Arriving tomorrow" banner in the Gmail interface.
- joemi 5mo agoAt work, we use Google Workspaces so that we have gmail and google docs and google sheets, and the "features" noted in this post have all shown up for us. That said, we were able to turn them off and haven't been bothered by them since. I don't remember the process being hard at all. That said, it's still something you need to do to have your settings not be the default settings, but is that necessarily any worse than any other setting you like to change away from the default?
- johnQdeveloper 5mo agoI don't think you can turn them off as a free gmail user.
- kyrra 5mo agoSettings -> All Settings -> Smart Features -> Turn on [off] smart features in Gmail, Chat, and Meet... If you disable that feature, all AI everything goes away (including sorting by category). There are some more targeted features you can disabled to disable writing helpers if you want.
- MattPalmer1086 5mo agoRight - I have that turned off. I don't see any of the things the OP is complaining about.
- zkmon 5mo ago> so I left to where?
- booleandilemma 5mo ago[dead]
- dexzod 5mo agoFastmail
- latexr 5mo agoFastmail. It’s covered at the bottom of the post.
- baggachipz 5mo agoIt says it right in the post. Custom domain and email host (fastmail). When you use your own domain, you can use whatever host you want and switch if they begin to suck.
- economistbob 5mo ago[flagged]
- Sebguer 5mo agoI often think about leaving gmail, but it's not clear what the better option out there is, that doesn't create a bunch of pain in terms of not having good replacements for the rest of the ecosystem.
- __MatrixMan__ 5mo agoYour google account still works for drive if you switch from gmail to fastmail or proton or whatever. If you associate it with a domain you control you can even move the same email address between providers.
- qingcharles 5mo agoIf it's just email, then Fastmail wins hands-down, IMO. I've been a customer for 20+ years. On my primary Google account I don't even have a Gmail account at all, but a warning if you set it up like that -- some Google products do not work at all, e.g. you cannot connect Docs to Gemini without an @gmail.com address. It will give you a prompt that looks like it came from 1998 and ask you to sign up. I keep a separate Google account with an @gmail because some web sites don't even let you sign up with non-major-provider domains these days.
- tim-tday 5mo agoThe key point here is not that they think you’re stupid but that they refuse to let you say no. One of the Google founders (Sergei I think) read the book “nudge” and fell in love with it. What Google product managers fail to realize is that a hard nudge is called a shove. And removing the ability to say no is theft of consent. They continue to do it because it works and there’s nobody left there with enough courage to stop them.
- xp84 5mo ago> "nobody left there with enough courage to stop them" I'd add it's also that there's nobody left to compete with them, either. They own the only desktop browser that matters, and basically the entire concept of the mobile phone itself outside the US (Android), and it seems like 50% or so of the corporate email market, 80% of the consumer email market, a high percentage of the advertising market. I don't think pre-1984 AT&T had half the dominance Google does.
- carlosjobim 5mo ago> I'd add it's also that there's nobody left to compete with them, either. Except for the largest and most profitable company in the world, that is.
- xp84 5mo agoYou mean the one that accepts a $20,000,000,000 check from Google every year to support and further entrench their power? The one that has a 20% smartphone marketshare worldwide? The one that has agreed to buy a white-labelled Gemini to help them finally get an AI assistant? In our HN bubble, where most people are high-income (heck, most of us have enough secondhand iPhones to make sure our parents and grandparents are blue-bubble too) and a lot of us are American it's easy to think this is at least a 2-horse race, if not an outright Apple win. But worldwide, Apple is not an important factor in Google's dominance. And they only challenge Google in a few ways, none of which strategically threaten them. They enhance Google's dominance in advertising with the Search deal and, whether intentional or just out of cheapness, by making their offerings like iCloud uncompetitive on the free tier. iCloud has had a 5GB total storage cap since it launched 15 years ago, for instance. Competition would look like them putting momentum behind a Google competitor for search/advertising (including perhaps a homegrown search engine) and for AI, making their mail offering more powerful, adding a serious and compelling business productivity offering (replace Gmail/Calendar/Docs, and no, the thing they announced a few months ago is still a joke). Of course, I have zero expectation they'll ever do any of that, I'm just pointing out what it would look like if Apple had any intention on competing with Google. Apple sees Google as a customer who pays them for eyeballs, allowing them to outsource the dirty work of privacy invasion that goes into advertising. Google also saves Apple a lot of hard work in building and running web properties and server infra -- work that Apple has proven really bad at time and time again.
- nyeah 5mo agoSo much like Clippy.
- glerk 5mo agoI just can't stand how Gmail is putting a red line under every other sentence that I write (telling me that my writing style is a "mistake") and aggressively nudging me to rewrite it to make it sound more like AI. Whoever thought such a product would be a good idea should be fired.
- bananamogul 5mo agoSettings->See all settings->General Scroll down to: Grammar suggestions off Spelling suggestions off Writing suggestions off (probably the one you want)
- glerk 5mo agoYup, I was just giving them "thumbs down" on every suggestion, but I know I am screaming into the void. But the fact that this feature exists in its current form (opt-out) means that nobody who tested it internally had the balls to just say "this is fundamentally the wrong direction, we should probably not do this". Don't be evil teehee.
- scrollop 5mo agoOut of interest - do you trust google reading all your emails? What do you think about privacy?
- awkwardpotato 5mo ago95% of the people I interact with over email are on Gmail (or Outlook). Google/Microsoft still have those emails either way, even if I switch off.
- glerk 5mo agoI used to care, but I don't anymore. They can read my emails, my code, track what websites I visit and what music I listen to, be my guest. I'd let them read my thoughts directly if we can build technology to do that lol. I realized that ultimately, these corporations are too stupid to do anything of value with all that data, so I don't feel threatened.
- Zambyte 5mo ago> I think we’re all used to user-hostile software these days [...] Malware. Call it what it is. Software that intentionally subverts and acts against the user’s intent is malware. It’s important to call malware what it is because people don’t even realize they shouldn’t use it when it’s not called malware. Instead, they get "used to" using malware.
- baggy_trough 5mo agoPlease do not call it malware, because it is not. It is just bad software UI.
- aprentic 5mo agoWhy not? It's a software feature designed to benefit Google at the expense of the user.
- baggy_trough 5mo agoBecause that is not what malware is.
- aprentic 5mo agoIt might not meet some pedantic definition of "Malware (tm)" but, for all intents and purposes, it fits perfectly.
- 3form 5mo agoIt's _badly intentioned_ (and not just UI). Blackmailing you with losing labelling, which worked fine before all that is a clear proof. So "malware" is not really so far off the point.
- j_maffe 5mo agoNot sure what you mean by blackmailing but it can't be the right word here.
- jedberg 5mo agoI probably accept about 50% of its suggestions for improvements. Sometimes it finds "misspellings" where I wrote a correctly spelled word but not the one I intended, because it understands context. Sometimes it legitimately makes the sentence clearer. And sometimes its suggestion turns the message from a warm and friendly email into a cold strictly-business email. Those are the ones I usually ignore.
- ngriffiths 5mo agoI don't know. I used to feel this way about IDE autocompletes/suggestions. Now they are widely used, and it doesn't necessarily seem hostile. It's not that hard to imagine the same thing could happen here.
- green_wheel 5mo ago> This time I’m doing things the right way by connecting my own domain to a mail host. I’m currently with Fastmail since they were by far the most popular option when I asked for suggestions on the fediverse. Question for the general public: why Fastmail over Proton?
- thedanbob 5mo agoIt's been a few years since I went with Fastmail over Proton, but if I remember correctly Proton prioritizes privacy while Fastmail prioritizes other features which were higher up on my list, like storage (not as important to me now), custom domains, email aliases. Fastmail also gives you static webhosting, which I don't think Proton offers (could be wrong).
- neogodless 5mo agoComparing a few based on cheapest annual plan that includes custom email domains: mailbox.org € 30.00 / $34.71 10GB+5GB storage, ample aliases, multiple domains, up to 10 family accounts proton.me € 41.04 / $47.88 15GB storage, 1 account, 10 encrypted email addresses, 1 domain fastmail.com € 51.44 / $60.00 60 GB storage, 1 account, multiple domains For more accounts/users (e.g. Proton Unlimited or Fastmail Family), the pricing is reasonable. But mailbox.org certainly looks like the best value at first glance unless you need a lot of storage. If you've got 6 users and/or several domains, FastMail does look pretty nice.
- atoav 5mo agoMaybe ot is just me, but gmail users can go.. [fill the blank]. It is one thing to not value your own privacy, but not valuing that of other people is unacceptable. Sure using the mysteriously free webmail client of that ad-company may be convenient, but the people who have to interact with you (or with whom you chose to interact) did maybe not make that choice. Forcing on them is not only rude, it should be illegal. I am not saying you need to run your own mailserver (although I do, mailcow is great), but maybe paying for an email service that respects your another peoples privacy makes sense in a world where a single email is the key to your kingdom. And I say that because AI that writes responses has to read your mails first. I am sure Google won't use that gathered information for any other purpose than suggesting a reply. /s
- latexr 5mo ago> I’m interested in what other people in a similar position have done. I have left Gmail (everything Google, really, that was the last one) years ago when they went back on their word of grandfathered lifetime access to a free email inbox with a custom domain. They did go back on that going back near the end of the deadline, but by then I had already deleted my account. I switched to iCloud+, because it was the cheapest option I found (0.99€/month) and it includes other niceties such as 50GB iCloud Drive storage, iCloud Private Relay, and Hide My Email. So far, no regrets. It may not have all the features of other email hosts, but it’s enough for my needs and the price with the extras make up for it.
- mdavidn 5mo agoGoogle has always been like this. I remember a presentation from the Google Cloud Platform team a decade ago when they smugly asserted that they'd take care of "the hard stuff" while I, their business customer, focused on ... the easy stuff?
- xg15 5mo agoThis was the same feeling I had with the Copilot autocomplete in VSCode. An AI-driven autocomplete that can write entire methods for me? What's not to like? But would it have hurt to bind it to a keyboard shortcut like every other autocomplete in the past and not have it go off randomly on its own, constantly trying to guess what I'm coding?
- Henchman21 5mo agoTurning creative developers into consumption machines.
- protoster 5mo agoThinking that Gmail thinks anything about you is giving them too much credit. The only reason for any of this is the desperation to juice their AI usage metrics.
- dyauspitr 5mo agoWhat I fucking hate more than anything else is this new nonsense about me approaching the 15 GB limit and then when I want to clean things up, it has zero tools that make any sense. Like just let me sort all of my messages with the largest sized messages on top. Instead it gives me some random selection of messages of varying sizes, most less than 1 MB. You cannot sort it in anyway. Horrible. Horrible I am so angry. Google, if you’re listening, the only thing I need in the cleanup tool is a sort all mails by size option. That’s it. Just put the biggest one on top and sort down from there.
- saint_yossarian 5mo agoYou can use the advanced search to find mails larger than X. Also if you're not aware, Google Photos lets you downscale photos and videos so they don't count towards your quota at all. See "Recover storage" on https://photos.google.com/quotamanagement https://photos.google.com/quotamanagement
- dyauspitr 5mo agoThank you. I’m aware but I’m referring to what they show on their actual clean up tool attached to the you’re approaching your storage limit message. It’s an infuriating dark pattern.
- romanhn 5mo agoPromotion culture at work, aka if I ship a feature and no one is using it, did I even drive measurable impact? Mix that with a healthy dose of fear for one's job with senior management pushing for "AI or bust" and you get these outcomes. Today it's AI non-features crowding out useful functionality, yesterday it was Google+, before it was Google Buzz, etc etc. This too shall pass (unless it truly is different this time).
- minraws 5mo agoPlease Google let me buy my email and move it to my own service without any restrictions and I will be thankful. I am now in too deep to move away, from my govt licenses to banks to everything else. Switching away from Gmail isn't possible for me, but I will keep trying, I won't give up but hopefully I would never have to realize how big a mistake this was. I feel like I might end up on the streets if gmail goes away. Hyperbolic but it's insane how true that feels.
- supertroop 5mo agoWhy can’t you migrate? It took me a year to move my business to protonmail. I had to change about 200 accounts but we finally moved. I’m curious what the hard limit is for you.
- minraws 5mo agogovt stuff, they have 3-6 month cycles for updating details in my country for certain stuff... stuff that can be changed online is better but there is stuff where i need to go to the office
- thedanbob 5mo agoIt's actually not as hard as it seems. Just set up forwarding from gmail to your new email address, then update your email everywhere at your leisure.
- GuinansEyebrows 5mo agocreate a new account elsewhere. set up a forwarder from gmail -> new account. create a filter/label in your new email. when you get an email at your new account, update the service to use your new email. this way it doesn't all have to happen at once; you can take your time and just leave the old gmail account up as a forwarder. save all your old emails to your computer for historical stuff, then delete them from gmail if you feel the need. it doesn't have to be a huge painful transition - you can do it slow and steady :) i've been meaning to do the same for a while but i need to find an email provider i like that lets me bring my own domain.
- 5mo ago
- 2sk21 5mo agoYou can turn off the "smart" features in the settings page for gmail. I did this and find it to be much more usable!
- ibejoeb 5mo agoThe author points out that disabling smart features and personalization also disables message categorization, so you wind up with a different inbox, while disabling individual features doesn't disable the most annoying behaviors.
- Tor3 5mo agoI use filters for categorization, where neeeded. Been doing that for years and it does what I need. I don't see any value in google doing it for me, when I can set the filters just as I want them.
- n-barraclough 5mo agoWhile Google Workspace for personal use is a sometimes a very painful product, at least it makes it easy to turn many of these useless Gemini features off.
- rurp 5mo agoI've had the setting for AI features turned off in gmail for many years now and am quite happy about it. Using the "dumb" version, there isn't a single feature I've wished existed that might be under those settings. Maybe there are some that would be mildly useful if I'd tried them, but eventually I would get rug pulled by google and have to redo my workflow without them anyway; better not the waste the time to begin with. Along with the author I also have zero doubt google maliciously disables non-GenAI features under that toggle to coerce people into enabling the slop features as well. Google being google, I fully expect them to remove that option entirely in the future, forcing all users to wade through useless slop. That'll be the impetus for me to finally get off of gmail once and for all.
- dreambigwrkhard 5mo agoSorry to say, but good luck, because deliverability would very likely drop after leaving Google Workspace. (But yes, AI features are annoying and intrusive at times.)
- BeetleB 5mo agoI don't get it. Just don't use the Gmail interface. Use your own mail reader. Don't conflate "Gmail the UI" with "Gmail the mail provider". Having said this - I never used Gmail for anything serious - I had my own domain + mail etc since before Gmail existed, and the reason was I got tired of "free" tools making my life miserable.
- neogodless 5mo ago> Sure, I could switch to a different mail client and never see any of these language model features, but my experience these past months has left such a bad taste that all I’m looking for now is a clean break.
- BeetleB 5mo agoIt took that long for the experience to degrade?!
- parliament32 5mo ago> the unsolicited summaries and auto replies are a means of artificially inflating the usage metrics for the language model features This, I think, is the part that irks me the most. Companies adding token-usage-KPIs for engineering is one thing, but when they have to resort to deliberately tricking users into using their slop-generators.. something has gone very wrong, and they're trying very, very hard to make it seem like it's not so. My personal pet peeve is Copilot in Teams. Did you know, if you turn off Copilot in Teams at an org level, it disables meeting recording entirely? Ignoring that meeting recording has been a core feature dating way back before Copilot-anything, I can't fantom any possible reason why recording a video of a meeting would require an LLM. Transcription, maybe I could see, but that feature is easily togglable with or without Copilot. But if you want to record a meeting, for whatever reason, you need to have Copilot on. Shenanigans like this is why user counts for LLM features should always be taken with a grain of salt.
- scrollop 5mo agoI find it odd how so many tech involved people here use gmail - are privacy concerns not a concern for them? I moved to mailbox.org years ago. Pay a few pounds a year for private email with webtools and drive and don't have google snooping my emails and sending me targeted ads.
- projektfu 5mo agoI'm honestly surprised they didn't reread the 2009 Gmail Autopilot April Fools Day joke in earnest.
- dreamcompiler 5mo agoIt still amazes me that Google and Microsoft and most of the rest of the "AI-first" companies continue to believe that shoving AI down our throats will eventually cause us to like it. I've never been waterboarded, but I'm pretty sure that if somebody ever waterboarded me I wouldn't drink water for the rest of my life.
- themafia 5mo ago> The message you’re sending is that you think I’m not capable of reading and writing my own emails. The message they are sending is you, as a user, do not matter to them. Only the analytics and KPIs do. They spent lavishly on this crap without asking if anyone actually wanted it first. Now they're stuck with a bad investment and no uptake. As usual, in the world of corporate power, you are just the inconvenient flotsam that occasionally rises to the top.
- dddddaviddddd 5mo agoVery happy to have mostly de-Googled, I don't miss the AI-forward product decisions. I only use Google now for occasional searches and interacting with other Google users (e.g. Docs).
- verdverm 5mo agoagents + EXA has replaced almost all of my search now, except when I muscle memory it
- 3683826312819 5mo ago[dead]
- vrganj 5mo agoI am also considering leaving Gmail over the blue squiggly lines trying to tell me how to "improve" my phrasing. I like the nuance my words convey, Google. I don't need to sound like an LLM with no sense of personality. My phrasing is chosen very deliberately to draw a very precise picture. I don't appreciate you trying to blur it.
- einpoklum 5mo agoGoogle/Alphabet collects massive amounts of information on us, for commercial and US-governmental purposes. It's good that Jerremy has dropped GMail - but he should not have adopted it in the first place. Large commercial corporations (especially though not only in the US) should not be entrusted with so many people's private mailboxes and communications, nor subsube so much of people's activity on the Internet. Unfortunately - one can't really leave GMail until others leave as well, in that Google will still have a copy of all of our email exchange with people who still use GMail. It doesn't matter whether Google thinks we're stupid or not - it's always thought we are suckerds, and to a great extent, we are. Anyway, friends shouldn't let friends use GMail. Try any number of email service providers. I personally like Proton Mail (https://proton.me/mail https://proton.me/mail) as far as privacy-minded webmail goes, but it doesn't have to be, nor should it be, one provider for everyone.
- ddosmax556 5mo agoI understand that this is frustrating for people who mostly write thoughtful emails. But personally I use gmail for exactly the following things: account recovery, system notifications, and b2b email threads. For the latter, I really couldn't care less about form or shape. It's a tool to an end, to get a point across. I found the auto writing stuff pretty useless so far (suggestions change the intended tone or even meaning of the email) but summaries are very useful to get a grip what happened in a larger thread which I should only know the gist of anyway. I might be in the minority but to me email is an annoying requirement to reach out to people, and that is not due to the AI tools, it's due to: thread management, the horrible noise of unasked for newsletter, and system messages and updates I theoretically do care about but that are just inconsistently formatted and badly listed. I welcome AI giving me a better overview over what's going on than what I myself have.
- humannutsack 5mo ago[dead]
- cdrnsf 5mo ago[dead]
- why_at 5mo agoI can appreciate LLMs for some use cases, but writing emails for the user is the one that really baffles me. It's one thing if you don't speak English well and could use some help making yourself understood, but the amount of native speakers using this is so strange to me. How does this help you? If you can write to the LLM telling it what kind of email to write, you might as well just write the email.
- goodmythical 5mo agoI think you might be suffering from a little bit of bias concerning your own comfort with written english with regard to the general population's comfort with written english. I had a high school teacher (algebra II), my favorite coincidentally, who was actually functionally illiterate. He knew some words, and had a solid understanding of the alphabet, but ask him to parse a sentence or god forbid an essay, and he was completely lost. He was a native born american, english as only language, and simply could not interact with the written language. If he could have written (in 2009) "give 20 question test for week 1 algebra II student with answer guide" he'd have gotten (based on the prompt I just submitted): Week 1 — Algebra II: 20 Practice Questions Simplify: 3(x + 4) − 2(2x − 5). Solve for x: 5x − 7 = 2x + 11. Solve: 2(x − 3) = 3(x + 1). Solve and check: (x/4) + 5 = 11. Factor: x^2 + 5x + 6. Factor: 4x^2 − 9. Factor completely: x^2 − 6x + 9. Multiply and simplify: (2x − 3)(x + 4). Expand: (x + 2)^2. Solve quadratic by factoring: x^2 − x − 12 = 0. Use the quadratic formula to solve: x^2 + 4x + 1 = 0. Simplify: (3x^2y)(2xy^3). Simplify: (x^5)/(x^2). Solve for x: 2^(x+1) = 16. Evaluate: f(x) = 2x^2 − 3x + 1; find f(2). Write equation of a line in slope-intercept form with slope 3 and y-intercept −2. Find slope of the line through points (1, 4) and (5, −2). Solve the system by substitution: y = 2x + 1 and 3x − y = 4. Solve the system by elimination: 2x + 3y = 7 and 4x − 3y = 5. Simplify and write in simplest radical form: sqrt(50). Answer Key 3x + 12 − 4x + 10 = −x + 22 5x − 2x = 11 + 7 → 3x = 18 → x = 6 2x − 6 = 3x + 3 → −6 − 3 = x → x = −9 x/4 = 6 → x = 24 (x + 2)(x + 3) (2x − 3)(2x + 3) (x − 3)^2 2x^2 + 8x − 3x − 12 = 2x^2 + 5x − 12 x^2 + 4x + 4 (x − 4)(x + 3) = 0 → x = 4 or x = −3 x = [−4 ± sqrt(16 − 4)]/2 = [−4 ± sqrt(12)]/2 = [−4 ± 2√3]/2 = −2 ± √3 6x^3y^4 x^3 (assuming x ≠ 0) 2^(x+1) = 16 = 2^4 → x + 1 = 4 → x = 3 f(2) = 2(4) − 3(2) + 1 = 8 − 6 + 1 = 3 y = 3x − 2 slope = (−2 − 4)/(5 − 1) = (−6)/4 = −3/2 Substitute y: 3x − (2x + 1) = 4 → 3x − 2x − 1 = 4 → x = 5 → y = 2(5)+1 = 11 Add equations: (2x+3y)+(4x−3y)=7+5 → 6x = 12 → x = 2. Then 2(2)+3y=7 → 4+3y=7 → 3y=3 → y=1 sqrt(50) = sqrt(25·2) = 5√2 I'm sure there are many more accesibility stories surrounding these fancy auto-completes.
- obvi8 5mo agoI don’t understand. Do the people generating ‘content’ with LLMs themselves enjoy pissing away their own time ingesting the output they’re asking an LLM to produce? For all the amazing creative work carefully (or not) crafted by humans directly, you’d rather have the derived token sausage? Writing with intent to deceive a human, and otherwise generating ‘art’ with models is the laziest application thereof, and I’d argue it’s unethical. If you generate something and present it to me as your own work, worthy of direct human consumption and thus, my finite human heartbeats, I instantly have a problem with you. Email in perfuckingticular: if your actual reply is “yep, meet you there!” And you ask the LLM to expand it and bloat it in some way, what’s the justification?
- ajross 5mo ago> [Stupid Other People] enjoy pissing away their own time ingesting the [LLM] output Stop. Yes yes, you are a fine writer with excellent communication skills. You would never stoop so low as to allow a mere machine to write for you, and no such device is going to have anything but the most banal suggestions you would accept (I mean, even the most elite of us make the occasional typo, amirite?). Many people (most, really) hate writing. It's just difficult, for the same reason that you probably avoid, I dunno, dancing or public performance. People have different skills. And people who hate writing and know they aren't that great at it still know that their email is likely to land in the inbox of a snob like you. So... they ask for help where they can get it. To wit: be nice. You're letting your ego drive you to some unpleasant places. There's a fine line between chuckling at inappropriately-AI-enhanced communication and just being an asshole.
- aragilar 5mo agoI hate writing, but I don't send LLM output, because I'm not the asshole who sends junk.
- univocal 5mo agoYou know what's even worse? That if he had tried any of those "here look! we can write it for you!" tools he’d have found out that they don't even work. Gmail summaries are nonsensical most of the times. The suggested replies completely miss the intent of the original message I was trying to write. Most AI integrations around are basically alpha-quality code, that if there wasn't this forced pressure to adopt AI, AI, AI at any cost, they wouldn't have been shipped in this state at all.
- serial_dev 5mo agoOh I got an email about a booked flight, Europe, Denver, Vegas. For some reason the times weren’t picked up in my calendar so I naively thought I’ll try their AI tools to put it there… I tried to get it to work for five minutes, it couldn’t get it to work. Then I was so pissed that tried for another thirty minutes to “prompt” my way to get the events created correctly, highlighted the timezone issues… Then gave up and did it manually in 2 minutes.
- ufmace 5mo agoI would be delighted if they could get it smart enough to stop putting flights other people have booked to come see me onto my calendar and suggest that I leave on time to get to their home city to catch the flight! It's been doing that for decades, and nobody seems to notice or care.
- conductr 5mo agoSome human in the loop is to be expected, that’s a win on my AI engagement kpis /s
- agiacalone 5mo agoBecause the whole goal is not to help us. It’s to train their AI models. You hate it and then fix it. AI gets “better”.
- Tor3 5mo agoResearch on LLMs show that they so far can't summarize. They fake it by just extracting stuff, i.e. making the text shorter. They, as you found, can't understand intent. Or what's actually important. I never read summaries generated by AIs, it's a waste of time, and worse.
- phyzix5761 5mo agoI haven't used the Gmail UI in almost a decade now; I connect using my own email client. But this sounds terrible. I think the incentives at Google haven't changed. Engineers want promotions and in many teams how you achieve that is through pushing features with tons of user engagement. The features tend to include few options to opt out.
- dude250711 5mo agoDid you mean investor engagement perhaps? Or some promotion committee engagement? AI is Google+ 2.0.
- phyzix5761 5mo agoNo I meant the internal culture at these big tech companies is to push out features that get mass adoption in order to get promoted. If you push out a feature that is hard to turn off and is forced on 100% of users then you're on your way to that goal.
- croisillon 5mo agoand you had to be quite the hardcore google-fan to still use gmail in the year of 2000 and 26
- JumpCrisscross 5mo agoDoes anyone know uptake rates for these features? Are they actually hated? Or just hated by a vocal minority?
- Waterluvian 5mo agoMaking a 10 min email/work doc used to take far longer than 10 mins. Now it takes far less. This breaks the built-in guard against wasting people’s time. I wonder if a minor UI change might help a bit: make it normal to show “approx 15 min read” in the email/whatever interface. Just some sort of “this is the baseline amount of work you’re asking of the recipient.”
- lstodd 5mo agoI actually loathe those "approx whatever time to read" notices for about the same reasons the OP lists. You or your model do not have and can not a clue how fast or slow I read, or, and that is the point, how much time I intend to spend on whatever is up. The mirror is that you cannot know who my recipent is, or what I'm trying to communicate. It is equivalent in this sense. You only [propose to] clutter the already overcluttered interface with crap, slop and shit. So bugger off pretty please. If you do not, there goes your product: outta my window.
- Waterluvian 5mo agoI think it’s different when it’s shown to the author, not the reader. It’s basically a word count feature, which has been useful since forever. Except it doesn’t translate into a unit that really means much for this context. Yes yes yes, it won’t be one size fits all and all those uninteresting “but what if…” points. What we want is to cue the slop generator just what they’re producing for their coworker or whoever. I hate getting huge pages of careless slop that the unthinking author probably imagined would look impressive. Maybe only show it as a result of the user pressing the “generate slop” button. Otherwise it’s not needed for normal, human emails.
- prmoustache 5mo agoIf you can't articulate your ideas correctly and immediately, this mean you have zero understanding about what you need to convey in a message and your prompt will only lead to an unusable and uninformative garbage of an email. Instead of gaining time, you make everyone lose time.
- ian_j_butler 5mo ago> I think we’re all used to user-hostile software these days, but this is the first time I’ve experienced software that feels like it’s actively trying to be disrespectful. Always wild to hear people say stuff like this. First, all user-hostility is clearly disrespectful by definition. Second, almost all software, even the free stuff, is insanely user-hostile. We are all so completely frog-boiled on this it's not even funny. Yes, even people in tech and maybe especially people in tech. Everyone reading this has probably used 10 applications today that are completely ignoring instructions to disable updates/telemetry if they even bothered to lie to you that this is possible. IOS has years-old "bugs" where turning off voice control isn't actually possible, official docs are gas-lighting you, and the settings are just ignored.. so people just deal with paused music that inconsistently triggers on 1/5 of your sneezes or coughs and get used to it. Spotify performance/ux/sanity has been completely degraded for months now. Web-browsers routinely force updates to require multi-gig downloads of AI models, and before that, they had on-and-off regressions in basic stuff like copy/paste for multiple years. Your popup-blocker that helps you to stay sane feels fine about popping up some shit that tells you how many pop-ups it freaking blocked. This is just my last 10 minutes. You can dig into any one of these problems, lose 45m on some janky fix, and also know for sure that you'll need to spend the same effort on some related goddamned problem less than a week later. Besides the "ads for paying customers" type of stuff, this drip-drip of millions and millions of little points of persistent friction never stops. You think you broke it or you are going crazy until you deep-dive the bug reports or the reddit threads and realize it's all gas-lighting, and someone has made a choice. If the choice wasn't about disrespectful surveillance, auto-updates, or profit-maxxing enshittification then it's a greenhorn developer refactoring something for devx or aesthetics over UX, and the breakage didn't even happen in service of a real feature. You try to freeze the apps with snap or containers or whatever for some stability hoping to GTFO the fix-it-again treadmill. You assert proudly that "Computers work for me, I don't work for them!" It's smoother for a while but there's always something. A phone-home with a suddenly bad endpoint, a missing remote tag/version gets yanked, or the operating system itself will betray you with yet-another iteration of unnecessary path-changing nonsense that breaks everything anyway. Although they are opposites in every other way, Linus and Bezos may be the last living bosses that valued stability, backwards compatibility, and not fucking up shit that works fine. When they are gone god help us all.
- tzs 5mo ago> Afterward, I go to compose a new message. A colorful animation steals my focus for a second highlighting a new “help me write” button. I ignore it and move on to filling in the recipients and subject line. Does it do this animation every time you try to compose a new message, or is it just the first time you are given the button? (I couldn't simply look at my own gmail to see, because I tried that but mine does not have it. I'm guessing it is either something they are gradually rolling out or it is something only for people who are paying for Google services).
- manoDev 5mo agoI've also noticed Gmail spam filter became useless for anything but the most obvious scam/phishing, it seems any mass marketing gets thru as long as they follow some "best practices". I've been using iCloud email with a custom domain for a while, and it has been super conveninent, stable and spam-free. I also trust Apple more than Google in terms of privacy rn. So if you already pay for iCloud, give it a try.
- fer 5mo agoI'm on the other end, Gmail sends to spam all sorts of legit things. Including mails from the "Google Assistant Privacy Litigation Settlement", conveniently enough.
- cloudshock 5mo ago[dead]
- computably 5mo ago> but this is the first time I’ve experienced software that feels like it’s actively trying to be disrespectful It sounds like they use plenty of software so they must be incredibly lucky, picky, or both.
- serial_dev 5mo agoThe most annoying thing I noticed about Google trying to shoehorn “AI magic” into their products is Google Maps. I try to help someone navigate with a child in the backseat and they shoveled an AI button into their UI that is even active when you are navigating… Annoyed me so much. I already picked the supermarket I want to go to, now just get out of my way and get me there.
- iamacyborg 5mo agoThat won’t help a PM hit their bonus
- serial_dev 5mo ago30% open rate, huge success! Yeah because I keep clicking on it accidentally!!
- McGlockenshire 5mo agoThe button renders itself after the user interface is complete. It bumps over all the other buttons to the right. The home or work button gets replaced with the AI button. This is infuriating for muscle memory. Whoever did this will need to beg my forgiveness if we ever meet.
- baliex 5mo ago> I focus the message box to draft a reply, but there’s already one there. It was also generated by the language model. I delete it, replacing it with my own. The really, really scary thing is how uncommon this approach is. I think. My assumption is that most people roll with automated pre-written reply. Maybe tweaking a few things here and there, but ultimately preferring the all-too-convenient trade-off of the robots having written something close enough to what they wanted to say, using "better" words. Even when what they would have written themselves would have had some personality, even if it was their own flawed human one. For the record, I am 100% with you on your approach (on the odd occasion that I must use gmail).
- mvkel 5mo agoOne of the most frustrating parts about Google's approach to AI in general is their project manager-y directive from on-high, that any Google product needs to adopt all Google's AI tools, wherever possible, and will be ranked on how deeply the integration goes. In the margins: the user.
- vonunov 5mo ago> and will be ranked on how deeply the integration goes. Oh, that must be why the Gmail web interface has so many spans that contain nothing but another span (including the span containing the "Press / to help me write" placeholder text in the message body area when replying). Here you go, boss, it's deeper now!
- ok_dad 5mo agoThe LLM is also training on or reading your emails; my wife was emailing a client and it produced absolute garbage and in that garbage was information the clanker shouldn’t have known unless it read the other emails. That’s probably not a surprise but the implications are staggering.
- arjie 5mo agoOverly aggrieved style of writing. There's some prompts in Gmail to use AI. These are supposedly indictments of the author's writing or intellect? Anyway, the setting is in General and then Cmd-F "smart" and turn everything off.
- shevy-java 5mo agoWhy do people have to go to this, to turn off the AI slop?
- Bang2Bay 5mo agois gmail a paid service?
- elaus 5mo agoYes, people pay with their personal data (Alphabet is not a charity)
- DrewADesign 5mo agoGoogle can’t spend two decades getting bazillions of people to rely on what’s essentially internet infrastructure at this point, and then pretend their hands aren’t dirty when they suddenly crank the enshittification juicer up to 11 because they need to justify the gobsmscking capex for their largely hated new service. There’s nothing legally stopping them from doing that, but that’s very different than right and wrong.
- WarOnPrivacy 5mo ago> is gmail a paid service? Yes it is. We pay $6-$14 per user per mo, for the privilege of dealing with GMail's foistware.
- munk-a 5mo agoBecause AI is the next hot thing and it would be impossible to ship our product without AI features available... but for some reason users don't tend to opt into our new AI features that I staked my career on... Am I so out of touch? No, it's the users that are wrong. Opt them in by default and our usage will skyrocket!
- noncoml 5mo agoI host my own email with my custom fronend. I use LLM to summarize the emails I receive. Now instead of a full page full of graphics and shit, I get one-liners like "$100 charge on your Costco card at X on 1/1/2026 1:35pm" Also when I click "spam" on a sender, a domain, or an intermediate and the message goes to spam from then on. Not like gmail who I have to click "unsubscribe" and "spam" 100 times and still the email finds it's way to my inbox.
- sneak 5mo agoIt’s interesting to me that “gives all my private correspondence to federal police without a warrant or judicial oversight” isn’t enough to get people to quit gmail, but “offers to write my email replies for me” is. Adults shouldn’t use gmail. I think less of people who do.
- tokenomics 5mo agoThis is the header bar I see every day in Gmail <https://imgur.com/a/QCUP43o https://imgur.com/a/QCUP43o>. The color behind the Google logo is incorrect. I can name about 50 similar UI issues. Google's lack of attention to detail is almost impressive.
- varun_ch 5mo agothis looks like it's set by your org? https://varun.ch/posts/your-company/ https://varun.ch/posts/your-company/
- Almondioco 5mo agoNothing changed for me. I do not really recognize this tab suggestion and besides that, i do not see anything has changed.
- shevy-java 5mo ago> Congrats to Google, really. They’ve done a decent job at keeping Gmail stable over the many years I’ve used it. Which is why even I am impressed by how quickly they were able to get me to pack up and leave. I went the de-google route years ago already. Granted, I am still using some Google services, but I am not at all emotionally attached to it in any way. If Google were to go extinct tomorrow, I would be super-happy, and I am also 100% certain of that, no matter which repercussion would come as a result. Youtube gone? No problem if Google is also gone. Besides, some video site would emerge after that anyway, so really - who needs Google? Let's get rid of it already. It was an annoying adCompany for many years. Now it is an AI adSlop company.
- WarOnPrivacy 5mo agoI focus the message body area and underneath my cursor appears the message “Press / for Help me write”. I got this and went a bit mad pushing every Gmail lever there was. Eventually I worked out that the Chrome browser was puking this onto my unwritten Gmail messages. I had been using Chrome for just Gmail, because of Gmail's sabotagey hostility toward Firefox. On my 10+ machines I swapped Chrome for Bromium, ungoogled Chromium, Brave and a couple of others I don't recall.
- quuxplusone 5mo agoIs it something about using Chrome? My wife's Gmail was showing the "Press / to help me write" prompt last week and we couldn't figure out (1) how to turn it off nor (2) why _I_ wasn't seeing any such prompt in _my_ Gmail, despite all our Gmail settings being the same as far as I could tell. We both use Chrome (she on Windows, me on Mac), but I could totally believe that I've turned off some shiny AI feature _in Chrome_ that she hadn't. Anyone care to confirm or disprove the hypothesis that there's some setting in Chrome itself that will disable this Gmail feature?
- vonunov 5mo agoI saw the "Press /" using Thorium (a Chromium fork). Tried to use the element picker in uBlock to get rid of it. This failed, of course, because the thing to be blocked disappears as soon as the text input area loses focus, even after I deleted every event listener that I thought could have been relevant. In a Firefox fork (Floorp) using another Google account but with the seemingly relevant part of Gmail configuration matching, I don't see "Press /" at all. Not sure why exactly, it's a somewhat interesting question but I already went poking through dev console to write a selector for it and I'm starting to get irritated at the idea of spending any more time on it, lol uBlock: mail.google.com##div[aria-label="Message Body"] span[contenteditable="false"] or user styles / Stylus / etc.: div[aria-label="Message Body"] span[contenteditable="false"] { display: none !important; }
- jklinger410 5mo agoSomeone is having a case of the Mondays!
- nkrisc 5mo agoI haven’t seen the Gmail web UI in perhaps 15 years or so. I’ve been using it with various email clients and it works just fine. The issues the author describes are issues with Gmail’s web interface, not with the email service itself.
- tommica 5mo agoI still use gmail, and so far only a few spam messages have gone through. They really built a solid system, but the web ui is just not a good experience, so thank god for thunderbird too.
- JoeBOFH 5mo agoReally? Because I have 4 Gmail accounts, all from the days of 100 invites. Two have been used publicly in systems, etc the other two have never been input into a system. I have equal amounts of spam hitting the inbox in all of them. It’s better then say outlook.com but not much.
- tommica 5mo agoI have 6 accounts, and no, not really any spam - ton of newsletters but that is because of me having accounts in those systems. My spam folders do have a ton of spam, so clearly it is working at least for me.
- jonplackett 5mo agoYou can just turn all this stuff off.
- ivraatiems 5mo agoThe message they're trying to send is not "we think you're stupid" so much as "we know you hate this, let us make it easier." The problem is that they don't offer a way for you to say "no, thank you, I'll write my own emails", because they are dumping so much money into this thing and if people don't want to use it they can't justify feeding the token machine. You can turn a lot of this stuff off by having a Google Cloud account and using their "business-class" product, which gives you the power to turn off these features (most of them, anyway) for your "employees". I'm already doing that because I use Google for a bunch of stuff, but if I wasn't, I might switch away from Gmail as well.
- curvaturearth 5mo agoYeah none of this is helpful. Even writing in Google docs is inundated with AI in your face features I don't need 99% of the time. I don't mind the "make this clearer" suggestions in email writing, sometimes that does help me. As long as it stays out of my way like a spell checker, and is optional /opt in.
- graphememes 5mo agogmail is the best and worst email system on earth they really don't know how to integrate AI into it at all, and honestly I think a part of that comes down to a little bit of column a and column b. Where column a is that they are constrained by privacy and column b is they are constrained by complete politics driven work cycles that don't allow them to rethink or rework things at all or try things out. I'm pretty sure to do a single change it requires 50 coordination calls with like 5 different executive levels 8 kpi alignment meetings 6 product managers in varying different rooms 3 different user group studies and finally after all that you might be able to ship something but it's nothing close to what you or the user originally wanted. such is the way of "startups"
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- nelox 5mo agoAt some point it will be Gmail talking to itself.
- ninth_ant 5mo agoWe are already at that point. People using LLMs to send emails for other LLMs to summarize and then the other party responds with their LLMs. Human communication replaced by wasteful slop of no value.
- blt 5mo agoMy interpretation leans towards: Gmail Thinks I'm Lazy. LLMs have made one thing clear: intellectual laziness is even more pervasive than we previously thought, even among "knowledge workers".
- hagbard_c 5mo agoIt is all part of a ploy to bring about AGI, not by increasing the intelligence of the models but by bringing down that of the users. Do I need to add some sarcasm tag? Hope not as it would prove my point.
- jadar 5mo agoI recently had this experience with Jetbrain’s YouTrack. I was filing a bug, trying to be good and hand-write the prose, and it kept giving me editing suggestions. Not just punctuation and grammar, but critiquing my sentence length and structure! Well, I took its suggestions as helpful feedback, but the end result didn’t sound like me and it made my writing look like an LLM wrote it. It used short sentences, changed my vocabulary, and generally dumbed it down. I came away feeling like I was just a bad writer —- which maybe I am, but having graduated from college I feel like I can’t be that bad. I might as well have let Claude write the whole thing.
- zurtri 5mo agoI have a friend with dyslexia and he has always agonised over writing email. At work he would often get me to check important emails for him. Using AI allows him to feel a lot more confident in what he is writing, particularly when I suggested he tell the LLM tone (friendly and professional) he was wanting.
- lovegrenoble 5mo ago100%
- sunjester 5mo agoThey are probably glad for your exit since they need so much space.
- iririririr 5mo agofor the past decade you should have been using gmail with all the "smart" features turned off.
- programmertote 5mo agoNot related to using LLMs for writing email, but something that bothers me about using Gmail lately. There were a couple of lass action lawsuits (like this one: www.GoogleWebAppActivityLawsuit.com) against Google. The emails from both lawsuits went straight to my Gmail account's 'Spam' folder. I'm glad I review my spam box regularly. Hopefully, it's just the false positive effect of the Gmail's spam filter.
- hogwasher 5mo agoYES. Not just the Google class action notices - though those, which Google was court-ordered to send and deliver, are the most egregious - but ALL class action or settlement related emails get automatically chucked into to my gmail spam folder no matter what. And they don't ever forward spam, even if you've set up mailbox forwarding to an external address. There's no option for it. So to ever see those messages, I have to use a complicated custom rule to force it to forward all the spam to me, too. I think it's too consistent and longlasting a problem to be accidental. I think they're spam-holing all class action notices, instead of just Google ones, so that they can claim it's just a general error in their automatic spam filter.
- dspillett 5mo ago> but ALL class action or settlement related emails get automatically chucked into to my gmail spam folder Every now and then I get a glut of “if you bought X in timeframe Y you might be due a pay-out” junk mail, so this might be genuine false positives rather than something more sinister. Though the cynic in me, that has been right so many times over the years wrt corporate behaviour, is inclined to agree with your much less generous assessment!
- Dylan16807 5mo agoThere is exactly zero chance the gmail team is unaware that epiqnotice.com is a legitimate sender of class action messages and getting falsely blocked.
- 0x59 5mo agoA gmail expat, I've been over at posteo for about a decade. Couldn't imagine a reason to go back for my personal account. I've used gmail for corpo email since, but I don't have a choice there.
- neuropacabra 5mo agoTrue, search took a shot too. I am on DDG - not perfect, but at least I can I don't know...search the internet and not talk to LLMs about it? I am not anti AI, I am using AI a lot - I also search things occasionally in ChatGPT, but when I go to search the internet I want to go to search to the internet. Gmail I don't use for very long time, having my own domain and using email elsewhere...only YouTube is something I keep returning back.
- dbgrman 5mo agowhich email client do you use?
- neuropacabra 5mo agoApple Mail, I am a simple man :-)
- ajkjk 5mo agoMy brain immediately fills in the whole story that happens after this. 1. Someone links this post in an internal Slack-like app to relevant PMs and designers. 2. Someone in leadership respond "dang we should look at this deluge of CTAs". In doing this they pretend as though it's new information that people didn't have until now, since that avoids anyone being responsible, even though every single engineer and the designers that still have their idealism are full aware of it. 3. Some PM is assigned a project of cleaning up CTAs, which they half-heartedly do, and the situation is slightly better afterwards, although nobody is accountable or really cares and the same problem will happen again for the next round of launches, since everyone's OKRs are tied to getting users NOW and CTAs that stupid people click on / random people accidentally click on are the best way to drive a metric in the near future. Somehow they manage to spin the cleanup as a positive and wholesome metric-moving project instead of what it is, which is doing extra work to fix other peoples' negligence. 4. Nothing like introspection happens because the org is entirely driven by short-sighted metric-maximization. It continues to gradually rot, losing the engineers and designers who care about the users, with the main decision-making roles turned over every couple years so pointless pms and managers can stick stars on their resume. 5. In a few years when the accumulation of misanthropic decisions starts to actually affect metrics in a way that nobody can easily bandaid, some executive will start a new project to do something about modernizing the whole app. A bunch of people will ship things to clean it up, and a new design will launch with a bunch of user studies that validate it as better. It will almost certainly be worse, but nobody cares, they just need work to do, and they'll massage the metrics to make it good enough until they can switch roles again. 6. At no point will the organization be capable of anything like shame, which is a shame because that is what is needed: someone in charge has to believe in doing things because they are good for the users and not for mindless metric-moving, and hold those under them accountable accordingly. Instead we get this, which is basically the long-term symptoms of going public in an industry where user growth and retention are not very quickly correlated with changes in the product. As a result bad product changes alienate users slowly and there is little incentive to make good changes, because neither result affects anything in the next few quarters. So instead you get this bullshit: because it's an easy way to hit OKRs and get promoted, and people's bosses have no reason to disagree because it's a cheap way for them to hit OKRs and get promoted also. Not that they're wrong. When the goal of the company is mindless optimization instead of anything socially positive, maybe this is truly what optimal behavior looks like. Although you can be sure that internal messaging nevertheless focuses on how socially positive the changes are. Gotta keep the illusion going so nobody realizes their job is shameful. Or maybe that won't happen. But ... I've been around this cycle a few times, at companies who inherited Google's contemptible style of management. Somehow feels like I've seen this before.
- nicechianti 5mo ago[dead]
- dbgrman 5mo agoThe overbearing of gmail and the perpetual tech issue with Apple Mail made me want to look for a new email client software. I landed on Spark Mail and i Nope'd the heck out of it very quickly. There is no guarantee today that any software manufacturer will not slap AI whenever, wherever they can. I want stuff to work like linux commands. Do one thing well. Work well with other processes over a standard protocol. If you ever find a good email client @speckx let me know. Something that does not get in my way, can work on mac/windows/iphone/android, can work offline, can do basic things like search predictably (I'm look at you apple mail) and (FFS!) does not show me random unread badges on folders where everything is already read (You again, apple mail).
- doublerabbit 5mo agoWhat's amusing is that you have now have parties using Ai, GPT, writing the response to the same email that was originally crafted by Ai.
- kristianp 5mo agoI don't receive any of those prompts in Gmail. Perhaps because I said no when that popup for "integrate Gemini into Gmail" happened months ago?
- branon 5mo agoI'll never, ever forgive Google for killing the "Basic HTML View" client mode for Gmail.
- Henchman21 5mo agoI’m still mad about Google Reader
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- LandenLove 5mo agoDespite using Firefox, I keep chrome installed in case there is a website that requires it. I have recently started receiving Windows 11 notifications from Chrome, advertising their new AI features. This happens one two different devices. I haven't launch chrome on either of them for some time. It is maddening how much they are pushing this useless and inaccurate garbage on us.
- lucb1e 5mo agoExactly, I was also pretty unamused by Google pushing product ads into system notifications. Not the first software I stop using due to system notification ads! Mentioned it in an off-topic company chat but the director has gotten tired of people thinking badly of Google now that we're using Google Workspace and he looks for every parallel there is to be drawn to e.g. Mozilla ("doesn't Thunderbird also show a donations call from time to time?" Yeah, when you open and use the actual program, and they are ultimately a non-profit) but the chat was dead after that... Felt a bit that I was the only person who was fairly perplexed by a legit business pushing ads in notifications
- slipknotfan 5mo agoyou can solve the google problem: cd C: && find -type f | grep google | sudo xargs rm and also the win11 problem: format C:
- nosioptar 5mo agoWhy run two commands when the following will remove both google and windows in one command? cfdisk /dev/hda && mkfs.xfs /dev/hda1 && mount /dev/hda1 /mnt/gentoo/ && chroot /mnt/gentoo/ && env-update && . /etc/profile && emerge sync && cd /usr/portage && scripts/bootsrap.sh && emerge system && emerge vim && vi /etc/fstab && emerge gentoo-dev-sources && cd /usr/src/linux && make menuconfig && make install modules_install && emerge gnome mozilla-firefox openoffice && emerge grub && cp /boot/grub/grub.conf.samp le /boot/grub/grub.conf && vi /boot/grub/grub.conf && grub && init 6
- account42 5mo ago
- kizer 5mo agoLlm…………
- cadamsdotcom 5mo agoLooking for your alternative? Let me give you some (non financially motivated) praise for Fastmail. It has everything Gmail has - even app passwords, hide my email, and ios integration. The only criticism is the calendar doesn’t autocomplete addresses so that’s a bit more typing than I would like. But everything you do in Fastmail is instant. They live up to the name! Once you try it and go back, you’ll be shocked - Gmail makes you stare at its logo for multiple seconds while it shrugs and eventually loads.. then takes over the top of your inbox with “try our new AI features!” which never remembers that you dismissed it 50 times in a row. Everything in gmail is SO slow, while Fastmail doesn’t even bother with animations. No animations will confuse you until you settle in and realise that yes, things can be nice. Fastmail data migration brought across my 22 years of emails over the course of about 30 hours with zero help from me. Search on Fastmail finds everything - even back to when you could only get Gmail with a friend code. There’s nothing left on the other side, it’s all here with me. Going back to my brand new startup inbox (G Suite) gives me the same feelings I get wandering a castle ruin.
- sshine 5mo ago+1 When I migrated from Gmail to Fastmail years ago, I thought Fastmail felt... less featureful. When I rarely visit my abandoned Gmail, I can't believe I put up with the clunkiness. Lean software stands the test of time. Fastmail hasn't had a noteworthy UI change ever. Minor annoyances: - Clicking an iPhone notification opens the app, but never brings me to the actual email - It is difficult to unfold the full extended header section on iPhone - ...I can't think of more... It saves my drafts, it's not annoying, it has a mobile app. I might switch away for a solution that is more affordable when hosting emails for many family members and organisations. But for a handful, I really can't recommend it enough.
- FireBeyond 5mo agoI use it with Spark on macOS and iOS (Spark Classic) and it just works. Archiving works fine, marking as spam actually moves and 'activates' Fastmail's training. There's email masks, aliases, the UI is always fast and responsive in the web view when I go there.
- gs17 5mo agoIt's really bizarre at this point. I'm okay with things like having one-click options for simple replies like "That time works for me" (Google Messages on Android is hilariously bad at these but it's at least useful occasionally). I'm not okay with it suggesting a whole point-by-point response to someone else. Today I had an email from a colleague where it had a suggested reply so large it didn't fit in the preview box. The response was the usual LLM "sounds good but doesn't say anything" prose. It's not just unhelpful — it's a waste of everyone's time!
- ToucanLoucan 5mo agoAre we shocked, really? We have evidence from discovery of them actively making search results worse to pad query volume. Of course they’re using enabled-by-default, run-without-asking AI features to pad Gemini usage. The Valley is tripping over themselves to convince the world fancy autocomplete is worth 800 billion.
- jerf 5mo agoThe economic tension of these "run by default" AIs is quite hilarious once you see it. On the one hand, the relevant KPIs of whoever is driving this product needs to be able to show AI usage is increasing, because AI usage is obviously the Platonic embodiment of goodness [1]. On the other hand, these things are expensive, so while it's mandatory that Google searches stuff these things in our faces, they are also horribly underprovisioned. If my only exposure to AI was the various search engine popups or the other free AIs, or even the bullet-point AIs that I'm nominally paying for but not really, like in Office, I would also have a pretty negative view of AI. I use DuckDuckGo more than Google but whatever model they may nominally be using to power their search result summarizer, it is de facto at least two years behind the state of the art in a very fast moving industry. It frequently gets things exactly backwards and is clearly leaning on its internal model a lot more than the links it has supposedly read, and clearly has a thinking budget of "indistinguishable from zero", and I don't know what kind of summarized web page content is being fed to it but it must be getting brutally dismembered in whatever summary is being fed to the AI. The debate about how useful AI you pay for may rage on, but at least at this point in 2026, I'd say the AI you can get for free is every bad thing anyone says it is. [1]: I believe there is a lot of useful things current AI can do, but there is no level of quality AI can ever reach in which AI usage for the sake of using AI will ever be a terminal good. Honestly any manager, whether they be a line manager or a CEO of a multinational company, that has ever pushed that in any capacity, should be fired for demonstrating gross incompetence for that position. It's "second or third week of Econ 101" or so that you learn about why it's never a good idea to just open the checkbook and spend an unbounded amount of money on something, and nothing you'll learn further down the line will ever contradict that.
- phyzome 5mo agoI can heartily recommend going into your Google settings and disabling the global "smart features" option. It removes a huge amount of crap all at once. For GMail, go to Settings -> General (https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/#settings/general https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/#settings/general) and scroll down to "Smart features" and disable that. Then go to the next option, "Google Workspace smart features" and disable them across your entire workspace with 1 or 2 more toggles. Finally, just switch to Fastmail or something. :-)
- pickleRick243 5mo agoI found the blog post a bit annoying because it was clearly trying to win internet points rather than actually solve a problem. What you wrote above would have resolved the issue in a couple of minutes, faster than moving over to another email provider. I found all the Gemini integration into consumer products super annoying as well and disabled/unpinned all of it months ago the day I noticed it and thought "wth is this annoying thing". Now, if/when Google removes the option to disable, this blog post would be much more impactful IMO.
- philip-zero 5mo ago[dead]
- eschatology 5mo agoDid you read it? The author addressed this; they were unable to disable it completely.
- sourcecodeplz 5mo agoThe author did say he tried some settings but not everything was available to disable. I dove deeper into it here [0]. You can disable Gemini AI and others and there is also a "nuclear option" where you disable all smart features. [0]: https://favs.eu.org/disable-gmail-ai/ https://favs.eu.org/disable-gmail-ai/
- pickleRick243 5mo ago
- TonyAlicea10 5mo agoGmail’s summaries are both intrusive and poor quality. They actively make the email experience worse. This is all a solution looking for a problem, pretending that people don’t have time to read or write their own email. With both Google search and email Google is willing to replace reality with uncertain pseudo-reality. I find it extraordinary.
- Havoc 5mo agoSimilar experience. Google products in general are becoming really tedious. It feels almost like these companies have too many devs just cramming in features to justify their existence & year end performance review, rather than considering whether it is an actual improvement to the user's use case. Gmail is also starting to really get on my nerves with their enshitified UI. Every button looks different (presumably each "owned" by someone else). It's full of popup overlays you need to click away to get to the interface. On iphone 1/3rd of my inbox real estate is currently a banner about data sharing controls? I just want to write emails guys...
- dspillett 5mo agoIt looks like you are writing an email. Would you like some help with that? Seems somewhat familiar from somewhere… I got a new Samsung phone a few months ago (my last phone was showing signs of dying soon, and I'd promised to never touch Xiaomi again). It took a while to convince the two competing sets of GenAI features (Gemini and Bixby, and related features) that if I wanted their help I'd come calling, and until then they should sod off and leave me to do things myself.
- Tor3 5mo agoThat starts to sound like "It's a nice email you have there.. too bad if something should happen to it.."
- elija 5mo agoInstead of promoting LLMs to write emails and then using LLMs to summarize emails, we could just write succinctly to each other.
- ern 5mo agoSomething I hate about ChatGPT is that it assumes I want my text to be rewritten instead of engaging with the content. I like my writing style. Sure it may leave some sort of linguistic fingerprint and it may not meet some LLM’s idea of what “good” looks like, but I don’t care. What’s worrying is that the rewrite-by-default behavior is probably there because most users want it.
- distances 5mo agoI can't allow LLMs write my messages in any language I'm fluent in. They just don't sound like me at all. It would feel dirty and dishonest to send that slop out. They can be good at grammar checks, but even then I wouldn't fix quite everything, it's better to let some of my natural flaws go through.
- Tor3 5mo agoMy wife translated some text she had written in her own language to my native language, as she didn't feel she could do it. I found grammar errors, surprising ones. I found places where pronouns were used so far into the sentence that a reader would be lost finding what that pronoun actually referred to. And more. In the end I rewrote the LLM-generated text myself, many pages of it.
- topaz0 5mo agoIndividuality is not to be tolerated.
- cutler 5mo agoProton Mail is excellent as is their password manager and VPN.
- grishka 5mo agoSo weird to me to realize that for some people, email providers have a UX, and enough of it that they could consider switching. I've been using email through a client for decades. My primary email is Gmail, but I have no idea what Gmail is like on the web these days. Save for providers like hey.com, whose entire selling point is their unique web UX, I never understood why would someone use email in their web browser.
- julienbourdeau 5mo agoThe flow with hey.com so much better that being an app or in browser is irrelevant. It's 100x better than anything else I ever used.
- vizzah 5mo agouse IMAP and your fav. e-mail client. Gmail's UI has sucked for ages. Totally unusable for pro users.
- stanleydupreez 5mo ago[flagged]
- abhaynayar 5mo agoI mean I always knew Google could read all my files, but seeing it give an AI summary for every single freaking (PDF) file I open on my Drive is insane. Last I checked couldn't turn it off. It's insane. When I get some free time, I'm probably moving on to Protonmail or something. I'm always a defaults kinda guy, I don't care much bout privacy and such (I'd rather live frictionless) but this garbage useless AI bullshit is getting on my nerves. I don't need you to summarize all my private and sensitive documents. I know how to read.
- effnorwood 5mo agonow you have clojure. good.
- tambourine_man 5mo agoI only ever use Gmail's backend. I've been using it for years with Mail.app on both Mac and iOS. Every time I load the web interface I'm appalled. Not that Mail.app is amazing. It sometimes corrupts its sqlite db (I have 300k+ emails dating back to the late 90s). But it's still way better than the dreadful web interface that only seems to get worse and slower.
- NordStreamYacht 5mo agoWhy not just use Gmail via imap and a email client of your choice?
- ddxv 5mo agoI've been on the very cheap Zoho mail for awhile and it's done everything I want it to do including meetings.
- ddxv 5mo agoJust to say, Zoho is great as it has meetings / calendar etc which I need for things. I also just, today, tried purelymail and was also pretty awesome. $10 a year, I think multiple domains and users. Really nice.
- alfirous 5mo agoI considered Zoho in the past, but to bloated with feature I don't need, IMO ity more suited for business and enterprise like Goofle Workspace. Now I settled on Purelymail for the time being. It's simple and purely just email (pun intended).
- citizenpaul 5mo agoI moved to fastmail about 2 years ago. It was not a super painful process, they make it easy as possible. Also I used it as an opportunity to "reverse-whitelist" all my accounts by giving everything i use its own disposable masked address. spam is now nonexistent in my email.
- xyst 5mo agoGmail doesn’t think author is "stupid." It’s Google’s business model to sell your data as a product to advertisers; or use it to train models.
- tokenfaucet 5mo ago[flagged]
- Guestmodinfo 5mo agoIs Fast Mail having human support? Suppose I forget my password or suppose fastmail somehow bans my account then is there a readily available human on the other end whom I can message or talk to. Recently on HN someone posted about a school which lost its 10 years of Google apps data and account with no possible recourse.
- sedatk 5mo agoYes: support@fastmail.com
- hbwang2076 5mo ago[flagged]
- anonymousiam 5mo agoI haven't seen this new annoying AI behavior because I use IMAP to access my GMail. After reading this post, I decided to backup my GMail inbox, which is something I've never bothered to do because it's mostly a secondary backup that I rarely use. So it took a few minutes to finish copying all of the ~1,500 messages or so, and then I went to verify that I got them all. For some odd reason, GMail doesn't let me copy (at least via IMAP) any messages after 1/17/2024. It had no trouble copying everything older than that, dating back to May of 2009. I tried copying just a single message (from last week) and it silently fails every time. I can view the message via IMAP, but I cannot copy it. Has anybody else seen this? Update: It seems to be an issue with my mail server because I was able to copy the remaining 205 messages into a local folder.
- ttctciyf 5mo agoPersonally, as a gmail user of about 2 decades, this is the first I've heard of this particular issue, probably because for some years I don't even read past the word "smart" before disabling whatever feature du jour is being pushed in my face. I'm just now migrating away from gmail for a different kind of inanity[1] all the same. 1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48367950 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48367950
- smukherjee19 5mo agoThat's weird. I use Gmail regularly and did not experience anything like that; it works just the way it did for the past 10+ years. And auto categorization still works just fine, and no AI summarizing my email or trying to write my drafts. I wonder what difference we have in settings. Also, not to be disrespectful to the OP, but seems quite an... overblown reaction. To each their own, though.
- Tor3 5mo agoThis seems to be caused by "smart features" enabled in settings, and can be turned off. When they were introduced they popped up in gmail and you could choose to accept or reject, I of course rejected all of them (nothing good could possibly come from accepting), so I've never had any of the issues mentioned in the blog post.
- agenticmfw 5mo agoI disagree that the AI prompts are a bad design. But I won’t defend Gmail either. I’ve been using HEY mail for a year now and I really like it. No AI features yet!
- nisiddharth 5mo agoI want to do the same, but how does one migrate to a different E-mail provider? The current email address is in use in uncountable places, how will all of that change?
- lucasayb97 5mo agoSpeaking for myself who recently made this change, it can take some time and be a bit complicated, but any decent mail provider that you choose can receive messages from external providers. In my case, I use Fastmail with a custom domain and receive messages from my Gmail account as well. Just keep in mind that you don't need to change every single account at once. You just need to change the ones that you use the most, and with time you can change the others that you remember.
- virgoerns 5mo ago1. Buy a domain and bind it to your email so this situation never happens again in the future. 2. Automatically forward all new emails to the new provider (gmail has an option for that somewhere). 3. Gradually change your email in all services and inform peopke about address change. 4. Use your old gmail as spam box.
- ponsfrilus 5mo agoSo everyone is using the web UI? I'm still using a mail client (Thunderbird) connecting to my mail accounts through the Internet Message Access Protocol (IMAP). Today I feel old.
- replwoacause 5mo agoAlso here to say I've been a happy Fastmail user for like 7 years after moving away from gmail (or Google Business or whatever they used to call it) and it's been AWESOME.
- 40four 5mo agoOh man, I left Gmail 6-7 years ago for different reasons (a total overhaul & hardening of my personal privacy/ security posture), but kudos to you! Get away and don’t look back, you won’t regret it! I’d recommend de-googling your life of all their services, you really don’t need them. There are good, more privacy respecting options for just about everything except maps. Google Maps is the one service I still use constantly.
- distances 5mo agoThere are very good map alternatives, like Organic Maps and HERE WeGo. But Google's place data is such a good moat that I'm also still using it.
- 40four 5mo agoYeah I don’t use it for navigation, but for exploring your local area, finding restaurants, retail or other businesses it’s hard to ignore unfortunately
- ramon156 5mo agoI wish it was the same for e.g. SEO. Meta and Google ads are kind of a must. It's the only service I cannot replace. But for everyday humans, Google and Meta are the dark clouds in the sky you can just ignore, you do not need to stand in the rain. No one's making you.
- 40four 5mo agoYeah that makes sense, I didn’t consider advertising
- baby 5mo agoWhat annoys me the most is that I can’t efficiently track my emails with the default. It’s unusable imo if you have a lot of emails. What I ended up doing was to disable read on preview, and enable shortcuts, so you can navigate with vim shorcuts and have to manually mark emails as read.
- whiplash451 5mo agoGmail has become unbearably slow over the past year. What used to be instantaneous (like, opening an email) now takes seconds. Google, what happened to you?
- dajonker 5mo ago> Some of these features can be turned off. Others can’t. Or if they can, it means also turning off useful long-standing features like automatic thread categorization. This, I absolutely hate it. And like the author said, it must be intentional, so that someone at Google can show the usage numbers and get a promotion.
- goobatrooba 5mo agoI've moved to Migadu a few years ago for more or less the same reason, but pre AI - Google's unrequested filtering and sorting made things actively worse on my daily chaos. Moreover the eternal threat of Google cutting the cord for any non-defined infraction and locking you out of your own life is crazy. I still use drive and other Google features, but my email is just an account login and nothing more. Migadu has been a breeze, very sane and transparent payment model, human support, infinite domains and accounts (!). What I really miss are calendar features which are just underdeveloped, but it seems mostly the Microsoft and Google have ruined that area by doing whatever they want. I like the instructions Migadu gave for copying your emails over - just open thunderbird and copy or move everything from one account. I put everything in an Archive folder so can find it if ever needed. Just insanely pragmatic and it worked.
- zkmon 5mo agoThe reason why the tech giants push those features is that they tune their features to serve the average user from where bulk of their revenue comes from. If you feel offended by "Tap to improve", then you are not their average user. Their average user would be thankful for such offer to help. That's their product manager's view. Even for your own business and product, you would focus on serving the category of user from where bulk of your revenue would come from. And your fringe users would feel they are not cared for. That's what is happening.
- nntlol 5mo agoI think AI should not have the access to our Gmails its private
- leke 5mo agoI was forwarding something to my wife and I see this other person suggested in the recipient list. The weird way the suggestion UI is designed makes it look like they are already added, but I assumed I would have to select the person in the second forward box to add them. Anyway, I won't migrate for now though because I hardly use email anymore.
- crassus_ed 5mo agoSame issue here. I want to migrate away, but rarely use email and I have it setup everywhere which would take quite some effort to pull off.
- daesorin 5mo agoPage not loading...
- urbandw311er 5mo agoExactly the same problem manifests itself in Google Docs. Hit RETURN. New paragraph. Begin considering what you will write. Prompt pops up: “Help me write.” Every time. It’s incredibly distracting and turning it off is hard wired into disabling about 1000 other features.
- wildrhythms 5mo agoBut when you accidentally typed into the prompt field and hit enter it registered a daily active user metric so the feature must be a hit!
- articsputnik 5mo agoIf you want a Superhuman-like interface, that is running in TUI with neovim as a composer and a modern neomutt as a reader, check out neomd [1]. I'm the creator, so I'm biased, but I replaced my previously used HEY email with it. It has a screener and a GTD workflow built in. Just in case, it works with any SMTP/IMAP setup like Fastmail, or any other. Proton mail works as well but need a little more to setup initially, even gmail (but much slower as the article explains, I noticed that too) [1] https://neomd.ssp.sh https://neomd.ssp.sh
- moviepiq 5mo ago[dead]
- sourcecodeplz 5mo ago[dead]
- tzury 5mo agoA. Disable the Gemini suggestions if you don’t want it (I did so). B. If one’s using a free mail service for 16 years, and then came to not liking its recent development, in which world shitting on it in public is the right and necessary thing to do? C. In which world someone switching mail provider is a top front page news item? D. If the case in B is not free, then this means the OP was heavier user than my teenage daughter. Thus consumed more of it.
- FabHK 5mo agoBTW, one more thing where Google thinks I'm stupid: Increasingly, it tries to tie your phone number to your accounts. Fair enough, problems with fake accounts and all that, I don't like it but I understand it. However, the prompt is invariably "Let us verify it's you. Please enter your phone number:" or something along those lines. With that, you don't verify that it's me. You just verify that someone has a phone number. It's for your protection, not for my protection. Don't patronise me.
- Tor3 5mo agoYes, that's annoying. I have no interest in connecting my phone number to accounts here and there. Some firms go the other way.. I use the "Line" app for communication, and initially (many years ago) it was connected to your phone, which caused difficulties if you moved countries (among other things). They have, however, now removed the connection to a phone number. Good.
- AgentReinAi 5mo agoThe 'smart' features are a classic example of designing for the median user while actively degrading the experience for power users. Smart Compose, nudges, category tabs all of them make sense if you get 50 emails a day and respond to 5. They become noise if you have actual workflows. The problem is you can't opt out of the product vision, only individual features.
- slavoingilizov 5mo agoSo many seem to have made a similar move. But the one thing holding me back: starting with a new email address. My email address is not just for email. It's so firmly embedded in my digital life, it's hard to think how to remove it. It's my identity. I use "login with Google" in most places where it's available. It's my backup recovery for my MFA authenticator. It's my github alias. So what is the strategy everyone follows to start with a custom domain? Do people use redirection? Is that effective? What happens when an email is redirected from Gmail to my new host, and I want to keep replying without the recipients thinking I've changed email? If you do that, is it even worth switching, given you have to keep your Gmail account? That is the more interesting part of these stories to me than which host people move to.
- jjbinx007 5mo agoSame here. What worries me most is what if Google just decide for whatever reason to close my email account down. I've already had several Youtube accounts closed for (in my opinion) spurious reasons. The appeals process is a joke. I can live without Youtube, but I can't easily get myself out of the gmail hole I've dug over the last 2 decades.
- b3kart 5mo agoyou know what they say about planting a tree. buy a domain name, set up a forward from gmail, and set a reminder to migrate 1 account per day to your new email address. 1 year later you’ll be in a much better position in case google decides to randomly ban you
- VileSquirrel 5mo agoI set up a redirection and tried to change my gmail address with the new one in all the important places I could (took a couple hours; now and then I notice a new one I should change). I also still have my gmail address set up in my mail client so I can answer from gmail if I need to, but that never happened in more than a year. For everyone that actually knows me I gave them the new address when it came up.
- moritonal 5mo ago
- epsteingpt 5mo agoYour experience is 100% unrelated. The PM (I know her) is juicing her results, that's all. With pressure from her bosses and ultimately the CEO to show 'usage' in AI to raise $80B of capital (debt) to build more datacenter. Unfortunately, those are the incentives of the system. P.S. No offense to anyone involved - I wouldn't wish the bureaucracy inside Google to make a product change upon anyone. You've used (or tried) to use their cloud products right?
- rsynnott 5mo ago> The message you’re sending is that you think I’m not capable of reading and writing my own emails. Huh, really? The message I take from Google’s AI fetish is that Google is _desperate_ to push this stuff on people so that they can show use and make it look like less of an expensive failure. It’s kind of comical at this point; you can’t use a Google thing without being bombarded with pleading to use Gemini.
- ralferoo 5mo agoI turned off "smart features" in the setting months ago, and I've never seen any of the things the author complains about.
- dostick 5mo agoWhat the suggestion chatbot designers don’t realize is that accepting the suggestion may be a double cognitive load than just writing it. If it’s an email of any importance you have to read and understand the whole suggestion. And to get the suggestion you already expressed that thought.
- porknbeans00 5mo agoThe rush to AI everything has really showcased the epic stupidity of tech leadership.
- ndom91 5mo agoLong time protonmail subscriber and reasonably happy, but them not allowing SMTP access (other than through proton bridge which is a GUI app - workaround: https://ndo.dev/blog/headless_protonbridge https://ndo.dev/blog/headless_protonbridge) kind of sucks, and their search functionality is also not great. Debating moving over to Fastmail as well
- olliebrkr 5mo agoI agree on the search functionality. Even the apps do feel a little clunkier than Gmail. Considering how much I get for my Proton subscription I doubt I'll look for an alternative for a while. They're mild annoyances really.
- Dotcomico 5mo ago[dead]
- gbkgbk 5mo ago[flagged]
- egorfine 5mo agoIt's the general attitude of multiple companies that I see that makes my blood boil: obviously you are stupid and therefore we will treat you like a toddler.
- high_byte 5mo agoyou vill use ze ai und you vill love it
- alok-g 5mo agoWhatsApp too is nowadays showing nagging 'predictions' for what I want to type with no way to disable those. I do use AI for a lot of things, but otherwise I do not even use auto-correct, auto-capitalization, auto-anything.
- bonheurisop 5mo agoit needs phone number
- moealmaw 5mo agoI feel the same about auto completion in antigravity
- sylware 5mo agoI left gmail... well, not really, I was kicked out of gmail, because I am a user of noscript/basic HTML browsers and the only way to "revalidate" you account was to use a whatng cartel web engine. I recall the noscript/basic HTML interface of gmail was dropped after a while. At the time I was paying for DNS. Then, most, if not all, DNS registrars which are not requiring a whatng cartel web engine are now gone. The email people were careful to design the email system to work without DNS, then I went IPv[46] literals. It is stronger than SPF, since if the SMTP IP does no match the IPs in the envelope and the headers the email will be dropped. But the "geniuses" at gmail ignore that and say that I don't have a DNS PTR record... how convenient... (My ISP does provide a PTR service... gated behind the requirement of a 'whatng cartel' web engine...). And I don't forget about "spamhaus", a shady swiss/andoran company, which many email admins have a weird tendency to pay that for their block lists which includes ISP consumer IPs (people do not have the right to have an email server, ofc). We are going to endup with with compuserve/AOL all over again.
- Tor3 5mo agoSomewhat off-topic, but also a followup.. I'm worried I'll be "kicked out" of gmail as well, at least on my mobile gmail device.. an Android tablet. I have an old one which doesn't receive Android updates anymore, gmail works perfectly fine in Opera (and Vivaldi). I have a newer Android tablet, I bought it to be ready when the day came that the old one doesn't work for some reason, or an app won't work and can't be updated (due to too old Android - and in fact there are a few of those already). The problem? The browsers work fine on everything on the new tablet, EXCEPT gmail. Whenever I try gmail, in Opera or Vivaldi (same versions as on the old tablet), I get something along the lines of "the site can't be found". As if wifi was off. (paraphrased, I don't have one in front of me). Been like that forever. It's baffling.
- victor22 5mo agoGmail has been pure shit for the past years. I started because it did not have spam, now I get endless spam on a daily basis like they're trying to kick me out on purpose
- Tor3 5mo agoI don't see any of those (horribly-sounding) AI "helpers" when I read or write messages in gmail. I tried it again just now, to make sure that nothing had changed since yesterday. I do remember clicking through some suggested "feature improvements" a while ago and saying "No" to all of them. Can't really remember what it was though. Can it be that the author has some option enabled in settings somewhere which allows this? Or is this something GMail is (forcibly) gradually rolling out? If so, shudder. EditUpdate: After reading another comment, this must have been a bunch of "smart features" which gmail suggested a while ago. I just, as I said, refused all of them. So they're available in Settings somewhere. Find, turn off.
- upofadown 5mo agoGmail is one of the shoddiest of the ultra-cheap email providers. If you use Gmail, a significant number of messages will disappear. They don't go to junk, they just disappear. Gmail will reject messages for obscure technical reasons. They recently decided that they would no longer accept messages signed with 1024 bit RSA DKIM. So, with no public announcement they just turned on the restriction. I found out about this from a random Mastodon poster who wasn't really sure what was going on. The error message returned to the sender gave no indication at all. Gmail is the email provider for people that like to claim they never got the email. Google has somehow made the most reliable messaging medium, unreliable. It is obvious that Google simply doesn't care about email. So it makes perfect sense for them to use Gmail to promote something that they do care about.
- Henchman21 5mo agoThey care about reading your emails. At this point that is why gmail exists.
- theYipster 5mo agoI'm amazed at how many folks on this forum see the Web UI as intrinsically tied to the service. As someone else rightly said, e-mail = IMAP + SMTP. That is true of Gmail as well. Frankly, I've always hated the Gmail web UI, so I never use it. Not in the 22 years I've had a Gmail account. IMHO, Superhuman gets a ton right... A Superhuman clone (maybe in VIM or Emacs) would be ideal if you don't want the AI features or the $40/month fee. Don't even need to change your mail address, since it connects to Gmail.
- seobot_dk1289 5mo ago[flagged]
- dkoprowski 5mo agoI think more and more about just moving back to Thunderbird client. Not ready though to give up on my google account, the calendar is too good.
- stetrain 5mo agoA big question about this push for AI/LLM features in products, and I think very related to public sentiment on AI, is that if these features were so desirable and useful why do they need to be so forcefully promoted? If these features were so useful, the internet would be full of articles and viral videos about how to turn them on and use them. Instead, every single software service you sign in to now has to stop you with popups, chat windows, and sparkle animations to show you all of the shiny new AI features they have added, like they're all Microsoft trying to convince you to switch your browser to Edge.
- hadlock 5mo agoGoogle announced at their annual blah blah last month that they want to be the center of your digital life. Gmail is probably their most popular/stickiest product after search, so there's a lot of pressure to make sure it is the loss leader in making your life "less complicated" or easier or whatever the thought leadership is this week. If they can't make gmail effortless and easy with AI then the whole concept quickly collapses under its own weight. Unfortunately everyone has been doing email (gmail in particular) for literal decades now so adding AI feels especially forced. The "swipe to help you type" prompt actually blocks me pasting text into a new email in the android app which absolutely boggles the mind. I'm about to switch back to K-9 email client which I haven't used in probably a decade just so my email will work again.
- dangus 5mo agoThe advantages Gmail had when it arrived on the scene just don’t exist anymore. We have to remember that when Gmail was released, email providers were stingy on storage and decent web mail was unheard of. Now, if you run over to a paid alternative like FastMail you’ll actually have a faster/better webmail experience. I also think everyone should use email on their own domain so that it’s easy to kick your provider to the curb if they go downhill. As long as you own the domain you can do whatever you want.
- mzmzmzm 5mo agoI use Fastmail for personal email, but my org is a Google shop. If you have "smart features and personalization" turned off it doesn't even try with AI tools, and I toggled that years ago to get it to stop doing the smart category stuff. The horrifying thing as they pile on "AI" features lately is realizing that most of my coworkers have a totally different email experience.
- boston_clone 5mo agoI stopped using google as my primary email service a few years ago in favor of the custom domain integration that comes with iCloud+. If you already have a domain and know what an MX or CNAME record is, it takes less than thirty minutes to set up. Migrating critical correspondence / autopay / etc. may take some time, but observing how much spam continues to flow to your old inbox will certainly be surprising. Now, it is exceptionally easy for me to keep all messages read, and only use my google account for junk signup forms. https://support.apple.com/guide/icloud/add-a-domain-you-own-mma473945269/icloud https://support.apple.com/guide/icloud/add-a-domain-you-own-... https://support.apple.com/en-us/102540 https://support.apple.com/en-us/102540
- LASR 5mo agoForget all the AI stuff. Please make the subject editable by default. Come on Google.
- alun 5mo agoSending AI-generated messages can also be disrespectful to the recipient. Personally, I often just don't bother responding when I receive low-effort messages that are clearly AI-generated.
- rldjbpin 5mo agohow about not using the web client and switching to a desktop/mobile one and importing your account there? it creates a standard experience across providers. regardless if you aim to switch to a self-hosted one, it might look like this anyway. switching emails is as annoying as changing phone numbers as you need to update it across everything in your life, digital or otherwise.