Gmail thinks I'm stupid, so I left
moddedbear.com522 points by speckx 4 hours ago
522 points by speckx 4 hours ago
Looking 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.
Despite 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.
I 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.
The most frustrating thing to me is to receive a 5-paragraph-plus email that was clearly written with some AI that filled in the email with vapid and useless talking points, like "Let me know if you need any other blah blah blah; While there is clearly a need for system improvement, we are working hard to address the underlying and fundamental issue; This is a lesson that it's not just a feature, it's a critical path for our users, etc."
My theory is that people are fundamentally averse to the thought and effort it takes to write a good quality email. Then there’s probably some underlying belief that more volume shows more effort, which people will perceive positively. And finally, there's the worry that if you write the email yourself, you might make some embarrassing wording, grammar, or spelling mistake.
Specifically, lets imagine LLMs as compilers - you're passing your prompt through to get some pretty language at the end.
Don't send me your compiled code, send me your prompt. Let it be rude, if the wording is awkward I guarantee I can understand it just as well as an LLM, ignore the fact that my daughter just graduated and offering hallucinated platitudes.
Send me the actual question, don't make me try and decompile a big blob of empty text to the ten word prompt that contains all the actual meaning.
AI is a useful tool for a variety of purposes, what it is not useful for is expanding a short statement to an essay and reducing an essay to a short statement. Either the communication deserves to be an essay or ten words will get it done.
Tangentially, yes, let's imagine LLMs as compilers.
How insane is it to advocate the usage of these non-deterministic compilers, where each time you compile may produce different semantics?
And then people resort to saving and hand-editing the compiled output.
But when they want to change the source, they recompile and have to start over hand-editing the output again.
Actually, in professional usage in a technical setting this is my prime objection to heavily LLM driven development. Were the tools in usage deterministic then I'd be a lot less objecting to the mandating of their incorporation into workflows.
I want to be reading, writing, testing and maintaining the software at the same layer. Right now extreme AI usage leads to reading, testing and maintaining happening in a less expressive language than writing and guess which of those four activities developers enjoy the least and find the hardest - it sure isn't writing.
if you are prompting such that the LLM isn't pulling context that the recipient doesn't have access to, then your email is likely marginal.
ie the prompt "Send 'bob' an email with a description of why the VPN bridge isn't working so they can debug their side" is a mostly useless as a prompt for anyone, it's only useful when the LLM has all the context of some analysis of the particular issue and what is going on and then injects it into the email.
yeah this is what drives me crazy about LLM writing. Most of the time the prompt has all the info you need and is like maybe a few sentences. Then the LLM expands it into a few paragraphs...
I guess if someone is writing like a big fancy email to send out in bulk, maybe using an LLM to improve would make sense... but just emailing some coworkers it seems super lazy and insulting to send an LLM output :-I
Either rely upon everyone else changing their behavior, or give up and use your LLM to re-compress incoming messages to be informationally dense as you see fit.
It's lossy tho. LLMs are crap at picking the "good stuff". Eg: the summary of the email covered the point about the family event but missed that the deal-terms were moving from Wyoming to Delaware.
Just because you yourself are OK with being talked to rudely, doesn't mean others are. In fact I'd wager most aren't consciously or unconsciously...
I'm pretty sure "rude" in this context means "brief and to the point", not insulting. Otherwise you can be rude with an LLM as well.
Most people I know are happy to receive a focused email rather than an LLM-enhanced, 6 paragraph wall of text.
Yeah that attitude will not get you far in life unless you're Steve Jobs, and it'll sink your ship unless you're obnoxiously rich. And even if you're either/both of those things: A. you can and should act better, and B. people will always attach an asshole-asterisk to your name for the rest of your life and probably even a good while after.
Exactly. In my 25+ year career, I've encountered maybe two dozen or so people whose e-mails and chats were terse, yet admittedly succinct, one-liners and most of them were also raging assholes to work with. The ones who also didn't use capital letters or punctuation in their communications were uniformly assholes.
But it's far less rude to just bluntly say something than to send an email generated by an LLM.
I wonder if slight grammar incorrectness (like not capitalizing your sentences or using abbreviations) is going to start becoming a signal of authenticity for people subconsciously. Maybe it already has.
> receive a 5-paragraph-plus email that was clearly written with some AI
Which is promptly and ironically summarized by AI on the receiving side
Sure, but LLMs are inherently lossy. There is no guaranteed way for the second AI to extract the original prompt from the text.
It's almost as though someone was put in charge of AI growth and all they care about is token burn.
thats completely illogical and no business would ever waste their money something like that (eyes-looking emoji)
> more volume shows more effort
I didn't have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead. - M. Twain
> Then there’s probably some underlying belief that more volume shows more effort
Hopefully, LLMs will kill that attitude in the long run
LLM-written emails are too wordy. But maybe people think that’s what a good email is.
(Did an LLM write your post?)
It’s the protocol of the brave new world, you and the recipient need a single sentence to communicate but the culture dictates using certain language and politeness + personal flavor so your AI helps you write culturally appropriate fluff and the person who receives it is using their AI to get rid if the fluff so you are both optimized for productivity through stripping the culture away making your interactions faceless and yourself fungible.
You can imagine this spread into dating as well, so you just have sex efficiently to optimize the breeding and hedonism.
At some point the protocol of expanding and then compacting with AI will also be removed to optimize the unneeded inference and people will again talk to each other but using the caveman language, stripped away from centuries of culture.
My ADHD rejects modernity. I shall type novels when engaged in discussions about feature design decisions and if your question has an easy answer I will give it to you shortly.
I absolutely agree with your opinion and I loathe it.
I (mostly) welcome _people_ writing medium to long form emails, slack posts, and pull request comment (and the like).
What really grinds my gears is when the clearly desired response is a few words or a single sentence, and what I get is a link to an obviously llm generated 3 page pdf full of em-dashes and emoji bullet pointed lists with very little relevance or context about the question.
If I wanted Claude or ChatGPT's response, I would have asked them. If I'm going to bother a cow orker with a question, it's because I want domain specific knowledge or workplace experience that might be important.
I'm more and more often internally reacting with "if you didn't bother writing it, I don't need to bother reading it".
I would welcome your 30 min or half day turnaround with a well written and thought response, over lazy/disrespectful colleges who are just doing the instant 2026 version of "just fucking google it".
Ronny Chieng's speech at Harvard's Class Day that went viral put it well, something along the lines of "AI can write emails and summarize threads for you. You know who else can do that? Me."
It is no surprise to me at all that some people reach to bots for help with writing email.
I've seen some very incomprehensibly-written communication in my time, including from people who speak English as a first language.
The most frustrating group of consistent offenders I've seen was comprised of folks who absolutely should know better: School teachers.
It's insecurity. They worry they might be saying something dumb and the LLM gives them assurance that it sounds "better" and "more professional."
And they will just get worse at writing anything by depending on it. Soon enough practically nobody will be able to write.
I don't use gmail but often get an LLM to write certain emails. The benefit is that it can pull in context and typically one-shot the email without me prompting it at all.
For example, a tenant emails me about some issue relating to a specific property. It can go through my leases, find the right one, check other emails to see I ordered a new appliance to that specific address, track shipping/install, all that, then reply appropriately.
I think your example is just customer support and not something that requires a personal touch anyway. Like your tenant doesn't care about your tone in that context, just the information. (It does seem like email is the sub optimal channel for this task anyway).
But if you're writing to someone with the intention of communicating personally, using AI anyway shows a lack of effort.
If i write a bad email because i'm frustrated to some company or whatever and want them to change their behavour, i think a llm can write an email, which triggers these people a lot more than my 'polite' way of convincing others.
There is a combative, angry, foul mouthed woman in my HOA who seems to work hard to have a problem with everyone and everything. We all recently got a very long email from her detailing her long list of problems with the community rules. The email was so calm, respectful and diplomatic that we all instantly knew who wrote it for her.
It was convincing enough on the surface that I read it carefully, but most of her points evaporated on inspection. But as a piece of communication it worked much better than her own voice.
Youtube implemented the same sort of thing for channels. If you have a youtube channel and someone comments on one of your videos, there is an AI-generated "reply" that you can click to avoid having to actually think about interacting with commenters on your videos.
The weird thing is, if I commented on a channel and they sent me an AI-generated reply, I'd just hate them forever.
Normies love this shit because it makes them fit in the crowd effortlessly. Same reason why corporate slop was a thing even before AI.
Personally, when I message people I respect I either don't use AI or ask it "please fix typos only", but if it's someone I don't give a fuck about, then AI-generated slop it is, because assuming that the recipient is a random person, AI-generated slop has the highest chance of actually getting shit done.
While 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.
I 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.
I recently built 2 mini PCs for my kids to play games on, and went with Bazzite.
It was really surprising how put together it all is. The steam integration is seamless and it can play a ton of stuff even on an older NUC w/out a GPU.
It was the first time I can say that installing a linux OS was easier and friendlier than Windows.
It's only getting easier and friendlier comparatively. Recently i bought a new computer and installing an external drive and putting kde linux on it was easier than fighting my way through the windows telemetry gauntlet, the setting, and all the bloat. Modern windows disgusts me continuously in new ways
How are you finding KDE Linux's performance? I'm really excited for its progress!
> It was the first time I can say that installing a linux OS was easier and friendlier than Windows.
It's been that way for about 20 years. Where have you been?
20 years ago I was running linux as a desktop for fun.
It certainly was not as easy to setup as Windows.
using linux feels like macos back in the mid-2000s and windows (in a good way) in the early 2000s, like its some kind "operating system" for you to do things instead of being advertised to...
its such a breath of fresh air
Doesn’t happen on mac either, right?
Coming from 10 years of Linux to macOS, Apple deserves praise for this point too.
I don't use Apple Intelligence, Safari, or Siri on my Mac, and I'm extremely happy to report that Apple does not nag me to use these features at all. THANK YOU APPLE.
Windows would open Edge for random reasons instead of my preferred browser to nudge me to use it, Cortana was a constant reminder in W10 because it was part of Windows Search, and of course, we all know how they push Copilot.
Apple isn't perfect (iCloud is fine on macOS, but iOS is quite misleading and often defaults to on even if you really don't want it), but overall my Mac respects my wishes as a user and it makes me look forward to using my computer as a tool.
I can't get my ipad to shut up about iCloud storage. At least with windows I know how to turn that stuff off (worse case registry fix). I have no idea how to hack Apple's stuff.
It still does a tiny bit (iCloud Drive is quite pushy) but to uncomparably smaller extent vs Windows
Ehh Apple has been self promoting their own services directly in the OS for a while now, including popups via notifications.
It's hilarious seeing people complain about Microsoft when a free alternative exists. Humans are really curious creatures.
Up until very recently gaming is the only thing keeping my l and millions of others main pc from being Linux or Mac. I dual booted in the past but was annoyed. With all the work steam has put in I’m personally about 6 months out from just dumping Microsoft on all my personal products.
It’s impressive they have dropped the ball so hard that it’s causing a complete rethink for so many users like myself. Bullet >> golden goose.
I caught myself just recently saying that I only keep my Linux box around to play games. Steam is more painless on Linux now than on Windows.
I also stuck with them for a long time because of Windows until Proton became good enough for most games.
People will passionately tell each other to vote for [$moralParty], then willingly prop up companies which go against everything they stand for the very next day. Curious indeed.
This is just not true. Once your config evolves beyond “a cpu and a single monitor” shit starts to break. Linux remains a bigger hassle than windows. Every 5 years I give it a chance and every 5 years it breaks down in less than a couple weeks in some way that requires Herculean effort to fix, if I’m even able to.
How do you know if someone uses Linux? Don’t worry, they’ll tell you
As someone who uses more than one monitor, my Mac has far more issues than my Linux boxes.
Same 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.
Huh, 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.
On the other hand, if you swap "Linux" and "Windows" in your complaint, you get my experience.
Windows is a hassle to get working for advanced use cases, and then every quarter they nuke my settings via windows update.
I just can't do it. I managed to go about 6 months last year on Windows for the first time since ~2010, but nope. Not worth it.
This mirrors my experience.
Windows gives you nice sliders for things, which they will happily break on a whim. Linux forces you to memorize a Lovecraftian string of characters to do something, but it will generally stick for a long time.
I use both, with differing ideologies. My Linux is heavily customized with keybinds and semi-niche software that enables my workflows because I know it will stick. On my Windows machines, I've accepted that Microsoft owns that machine and I have to adapt my workflow to fit their sensibilities.
Given that Windows still doesn't even support multiple monitors in any meaningful way, I'm not sure what you're complaining about.
Does Microsoft understand consent?
[ ] Yes
[ ] Ask again laterApple does this as well with MacOS update notifications
Upgrade to MacOS Tahoe?
[ ] Yes
[ ] Remind me laterIt’s less surprising with Windows.
Google really was competent in the 2005-2020 era (probably further on the left, that’s just as far as I remember).
I don’t think Microsoft has seriously disappointed anybody paying attention since 2012 or so.
Not 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.
GMail users sometimes don't see my messages because they get sent to spam. (These are just normal person-to-person emails.)
Google used to have pretty good spam detection but now they seem to have cranked the dial over to err on the side of hiding mail the user actually wanted. It's not a good situation.
YES. 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.
You 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.
Oh 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.
I 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.
Because 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”.
I 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.
True, 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.
My 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".
It 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.
I 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.
Did you mean investor engagement perhaps? Or some promotion committee engagement? AI is Google+ 2.0.
No 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.
> 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.
Please do not call it malware, because it is not. It is just bad software UI.
It'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.
Not sure what you mean by blackmailing but it can't be the right word here.
Why not?
It's a software feature designed to benefit Google at the expense of the user.
I'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.
I'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.
I 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.
Apple? 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"?
Yes. We expect the company that prides itself on having taste to avoid doing tasteless things.
Apple hasn't had good taste in probably a decade and a half now. Their recent UI redesign solidifies it.
Tastes differ.
Bob likes red wine, Alice prefers white wine. Nobody wants to drink piss.
We’ve all grown out of that cliche. Literally every OS is opinionated.
Every OS is opinionated, that doesn’t mean they all automatically equally good or bad. Individual implementation choices matter.
You’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.
I 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.
Let'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.
Apple, maybe because of ego, is often not the major mover on anything they didn’t come up with first. They tend to take a wait and see approach with a lot of ideas. Hell look at VR (which I’m surprised they even did but clearly they see longterm value)
They'll not only do it, but they'll also wrap it in a huge fat rounded border
Apple is not the answer. If you want to escape AI, you need a modular Linux distro like Arch or Debian on your computer, and GrapheneOS on your phone.
It's not a question of escaping AI. It's a question of whether it's integrated in such a way that it works for you, or against you.
The blog post sounds like Google is actively making AI work against their users.
> It's a question of whether it's integrated in such a way that it works for you, or against you.
Google, Apple, and Microsoft won't give you such control. It's going to be AI on terms terms and for their own benefit.
Given that Apple recently started putting ads in Maps, I have no faith in them anymore.
I was a littLe annoyed by that, too, but mostly because there isn't an option to pay for an ad-free experience.
Don't worry, Apple has been watching for a decade plus. And it seems they will continue just watching
Looking at the next iOS rumors, I think it's inevitable.
Looking at the way the stock market rewards companies that brainlessly shove AI into everything under the sun, I know it's inevitable.
I 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.
Settings->See all settings->General
Scroll down to:
Grammar suggestions off
Spelling suggestions off
Writing suggestions off (probably the one you want)
Yup, 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.
I get the blue squiggly underline with suggestions on how I can improve what I write. I bet if I open up two drafts it will happily suggest contradictory improvements on it's own suggestions.
I'm starting to develop a squiggly line blindness, so be it if grammar in my email suffers :)
Out of interest - do you trust google reading all your emails? What do you think about privacy?
This doesn't strike me as "reading" your emails any more than a router is "reading" your packets when it forwards them. As far as I know, Google employees (even high-ranking ones) can't randomly start going through people's messages-- that's the privacy that matters.
I 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.
95% 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.
I 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?
> 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?
Comparing 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.
You need to add VAT to the Fastmail price, I just renewed 1 year for exactly 60€.
It'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).
I have anecdotally heard that proton has some more deliverability issues than Fastmail since it’s more preferred by scammers for its privacy features. That influenced my decision since I was probably already going to face some delivery challenges being on a custom domain.
I've used Fastmail for years but a year ago switched to Proton. For me the only reason to switch to Proton was that its hosted within the European continent, while Fastmail is hosted in
I would say that Fastmail is the "Ferrari of e-mail" services. It does everything well, or extremely well, especially if you have more advanced setups like wildcard domains.
In particularly, I miss being able to send from wildcard domains. While proton has a thing called simplelogin, it only works kind of seamlessly if you get an e-mail on a wildcard address and want to reply to that same address. Sending from any * domain requires you to make the address via the simplelogin page and isn't nearly as seamless. While you can make some sending addresses (i.e. regular aliases) in the protonmail interface, that's a trap, because once you've made an alias, you can't delete it unless there's no mail related to it in your mailbox anymore (even if you have a catch-all setup; I wonder if it has anything to do with how the encryption keys are setup, but it still sucks).
I also miss both snoozing and pinning mail. Officially, the proton mail apps (1) do support snoozing, but that requires "conversation view" to be enabled. I think the conversation view over groups e-mails too aggressively, and don't really understand why snoozing without conversation view isn't possible. It's utterly annoying. As far as I know, pinning e-mails isn't a thing in the proton apps. There are "stars" but these could have been labels (which also exist). They don't pin the e-mail to the top.
The proton mobile apps also lack various settings which are in the web interface, like access to sieves. The apps are sometimes a bit laggy, especially if you have a lot of e-mails, although there seem to have been some improvement on this end. I also still get double "fingerprint to unlock" requests sometimes.
Then there's theming, which I can imagine is (even) more of an opinion, but I liked the Fastmail interface more than the proton interface. I think its cleaner. Not a particular fan of any of the themes of protonmail.
I left Fastmail just as it added offline access. This was originally my biggest gripe. I might have stayed longer if they added it just before I left.
For Proton, they have been releasing a lot of new services lately. I hope they will spend a year or more, just polishing what they currently have. They did say they will spend some time on polish in a blogpost recently, but haven't really seen the fruits from this yet (or I care about different things than they do?). And I hope I will one day be able to add more domains to my account. Even with Visionary, you only get 6 domains for 6 users, and no way to add more.
I sincerely hope Proton will never add any of the AI nagging , the OP was talking about. If they do, I'll leave the instant.
Related 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.
They'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.
I chose typing every time.
And I chose to set a browser bookmark with the corresponding GET parameters.
Bookmarks is a surprisingly underutilized feature of browsers, I constantly see tons of people doing 5-6 clicks going to some page, I'm guessing simply they don't know about it. Similarly, lots of powerusers who don't know about "javascript:" bookmarks that basically behaves like tiny like browser extensions (the content-script part specifically) when you click on them.
And even when people use bookmarks they often don't bother to change the titles. Very irksome.
And you guys think that by typing or using bookmark with the same address didn't figure out it's your home address? :)
I chose using OpenStreetMap where possible, and in other cases, things like Here We Go etc.
It's the same on phones. You can't use Gemini as your default smart assitant without it also then becoming your default smart assistant for Android Auto, where it is useless.
It will happily find you some restaurant reviews for a town you are going to, but useful stuff like "Send a whatsapp to Jane Smith saying I will be 10 minutes late." or "Play XXX from Spotify" it totally fails at.
Their AI push is what convinced me to leave gmail and go buy my own domain. I don't want it.
what do you use as your client?
I've been pretty happy on Fastmail as a custom-domain email host the last few years.
I'm not the poster you're replying to, but i did the same thing and use Purelymail (and their web interface, which i think is open-source)
it's a very cheap no-nonsense service, i recommend it
Over the years I've recommended Migadu and still do. Affordable and reliable with usage based pricing.
As for the email client I personally prefer Thunderbird on PC and FairEmail on Android.
Also not the poster you're replying to, but I get email with ProtonVPN, which I've linked to my domain.
I'm not without my questions about them as a company, but Google are getting beyond a joke.
Full migration away is coming with next phone upgrade.
+1 for Purelymail. Most things that appear to be too good to be true are not true. Purelymail is the real deal.
That chat history dark pattern is the main reason I never use Gemini. Its a shame.
I've had similar complaints about GCloud, they shove Ai callouts everywhere, there are pages with half a dozen of these. Completely unnecessary, just need one button, not in every form and multiple callouts how "ai can help with..."
They have over indexed hard and turned off (formerly) loyal customers. I'm on proton + vivaldi + digital ocean + opencode-go now, replacements for almost every product area. Still need to make the switch to GrapheneOS
At least they reverted the shitty mobile Keep integration that was not only an insanely distracting UI but made the whole interface laggy as hell.
This 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?
I'll never, ever forgive Google for killing the "Basic HTML View" client mode for Gmail.
A 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.
My 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.
Yeah, 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+.
Heck, 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.
Promotion 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).
LinkedIn (the company not the other users) thinks I'm stupid, so I also left it.
I 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.
I 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.
That description would make for a good definition of “anti-art”. Which also describes the output of LLMs.
I 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.
I 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.
Overly 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.
Unfortunately, this also turns off the Primary/Promotions/Social/Updates categorization.
But so does the author's solution of switching to Fastmail so surely that's not a non-negotiable feature. Manual labeling and filtering still works.
> the setting is in General and then Cmd-F "smart" and turn everything off.
Once done, users still get the...
"Press / for Help me write" or
"Press / to write using your GMail and Drive"
uBlock Origin. The easy customizability of web applications is why I prefer them over other proprietary applications when there are no open source choices.
In this particular case, if the whole UI is irredeemable, you can access your mail with IMAP or POP.
> uBlock Origin.
I did try this without success.
> if the whole UI is irredeemable, you can access your mail with IMAP or POP.
I access my mail across a doz machines - and I support scores of users. Setting up stand-alone/3rd party clients (at scale) is a bit unwieldy.
The bad actor here turns out to be the Chrome browser. Every other browser behaves better in this.
Why do people have to go to this, to turn off the AI slop?
Because 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!
is gmail a paid service?
> 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.
Google 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.
I guess you might need to use AI to summarize the article for you, because he addresses the fact that you can’t turn the intrusive AI off without also turning off some things he finds helpful.
> 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).
At 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?
I don't think you can turn them off as a free gmail user.
Settings -> 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.
Right - I have that turned off. I don't see any of the things the OP is complaining about.
I 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.
You can turn off the "smart" features in the settings page for gmail. I did this and find it to be much more usable!
The 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.
What 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.
If it was profitable for them to fix it they could probably fix it immediately. They don't care because it's no longer profitable for them to provide excellent service.
They only care about providing a service that is just good enough to keep enough people from jumping ship.
And the cool thing is that damn near every company on the planet is doing the same thing right now so even if you DO jump ship you aren't guaranteed anything better, just shitty in different ways.
Interesting. I never have any problem with spam.
My account is ancient; every spammer in the world knows it.
But practically no spam gets through. And there are very few false positives. Going though my spam folder, I see a few legitimate commercial emails that I don't care about, but the rest is junk.
Most of it is being dropped on the floor without even getting into the spam box. I have only 65 emails in my spam folder. A few years ago, there were tens of thousands. I don't know what they did, but at some point they clearly started rejecting the worst of the worst, i.e. the vast majority of it.
I have no idea why your experience is so different. I'm on a Google Workspace; perhaps that's something?
They can fix it. They have certainly figured out how. But their "killer feature" is not that you don't receive spam, it's that the mail you send isn't flagged as spam by their fellow oligopolists.
We're now at the place where it's virtually impossible to run your own mailserver and have the mail delivered, consistently at Gmail and Outlook/Live/Hotmail. At least not without hours a month tuning, re-configuring, monitoring etc.
Basically, Gmail, Apple Mail, Microsoft, Yahoo (and to lesser extent, Fast-email, proton, or one of the handfull of dedicated email providers) have cemented an oligopoly. You must invest serious infrastructure, time and effort, or else your mail will be /dev/nulled (at random, often).
This "anti-spam" works, reasonably well. Because Gmail can now trust that Microsoft has measures in place to disencourage new accounts from sending large amounts of mails - and vice versa. Obviously Gmail can trust other Gmail accounts. And so they have a win-win-win.
win: No need for heavy, resource-intensive spam-training or scanning for the bulk of incoming mail - if its from a fellow BigTech, let it through. Win: an almost impossible high barrier to entry for any serious competitors. Win: Lock in, because anyone wishing to move will see their email not reach the inboxes of users at other Big Tech - aka the vast majority of inboxes.
The worst part for me are the false positives. I frequently need to get into the spam folder to discover emails that Gmail thinks they are spam, even though there is absolutely no reason for it. I have been thinking about leaving it.
There is a reason for it. They don't want you to receive messages from anyone who doesn't use gmail!
> 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.
I 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.
Google is also bad at not sending spam
I got a lot of group spam, where someone seems to have created a google group and added my mail to it. And then people answer the spam, and the answer is also send to everyone in the group
Do you suppose they are running the messages through any LLM? I don't know. I would guess it's too much volume to run all mail through a "good" model, but no idea whether it would be feasible to run mail through the kind of dumb model that generates "AI Overviews."
> on relatively new domains
I'm seeing a lot of domains that are clearly registered to spam without a reputational hit to the root domain; for example, wh***teams.work spamming me on behalf of wh***teams.com.
I wish Google'd link them together.
Fun fact!
Doing SEO/marketing tricks on behalf of your competitors which gets them penalized by Google is a form of blackhat SEO with a rich tradition & history.
I get spam in my gmail all the time. And worse. Just minutes ago received a very official looking email from Bank of America telling me I had received a wire transfer.
Maybe 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?
The frustrating part is the seem to do that already, except for these obvious spam messages.
Could be worse. I see the email from another person that has the exact same email direction that me, except that he doesn't have a "." . I see his private emails and I get double of spam... I use only Gmail as a "register and get a spam" email account. Any serious or important email goes to proton mail.
PD: I contacted that person and I formed about the situation some time ago.
There is no other person. You get all email to all of the same address regardless of the number of dots.
I focus the message body area and underneath my cursor appears
the message “Press / for Help me write”.
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.
Is 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?
I 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.
> 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.
> 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).
Yeah 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.
gmail 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"
Llm…………
This is the header bar I see every day in Gmail <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.
this looks like it's set by your org? https://varun.ch/posts/your-company/
Making 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.”
If 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.
I 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.
I 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.
The 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).
I 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.
If 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.
Your 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.
One 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.
Please 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.
Much like planting a tree, the ideal time to use your own domain for email was many years ago, but the next best time to do it is today.
Do it! minraws.com (if that means anything to you) is available, you could be firstname@minraws.com as well as your @gmail.com before the sun goes down. Personally, I'd set it up to feed into a new mailbox with Protonmail, but if you like you can just have it forward to the familiar gmail inbox you're used to.
You can start moving your accounts over one at a time. It doesn't have to be instant. Yeah, there are probably IRL business cards in drawers and people you haven't contacted in decades that will mean that you want to forward all emails that go to your gmail to a folder/label in your new email domain forever, but that's OK.
Just start.
Already have one but moving old services especially banks, and licenses and very old accounts and so on is such a PITA. I had to fill a dozen forms to move one of my govt accounts to my new email. This is not fun..
Why 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.
govt 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
It'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.
switching banks and govt accounts is easy. getting people's address books to switch is hard
create 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.
I 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.
Really? 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.
They are probably glad for your exit since they need so much space.
> 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.
The 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.
I 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.
Convenience. Also I don't really communicate private stuff over gmail, I have signal for that.
I did the same except switched to fastmail. I love it, it’s such a great service.
The 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.
> "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.
> 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.
As 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.
Gmail 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.
Thunderbird 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.
You quoted the very first sentence. They acknowledged your point later:
> 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.
The brand/trust is ruined for OP even if there are workarounds to not directly see what Google's doing anymore.
Google 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?
Nothing changed for me. I do not really recognize this tab suggestion and besides that, i do not see anything has changed.
Very 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).
agents + EXA has replaced almost all of my search now, except when I muscle memory it
I 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.
What'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.
> “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".
Somehow MS Word's grammar check does this without being offensive about it.
While 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.
Thinking 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.
At some point it will be Gmail talking to itself.
We 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.
You can just turn all this stuff off.
Someone is having a case of the Mondays!
> 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.
and you had to be quite the hardcore google-fan to still use gmail in the year of 2000 and 26
I'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.
> 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.
100%
The 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.
That won’t help a PM hit their bonus
30% open rate, huge success! Yeah because I keep clicking on it accidentally!!
The 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.
The 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.
for the past decade you should have been using gmail with all the "smart" features turned off.
> so I left
to where?
It 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.
Even Clippy had more respect for the user: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_Assistant
Is this a test feature? I don't see it in my gmail.
I'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.
Same. I haven't seen this. And I hope I never do unless I specifically click a button to enable it.
It’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.
I 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.
My 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.
I'm honestly surprised they didn't reread the 2009 Gmail Autopilot April Fools Day joke in earnest.
I 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.
It 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.
Google/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) as far as privacy-minded webmail goes, but it doesn't have to be, nor should it be, one provider for everyone.
> 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.
"Lie to people who want to be lied to, and you’ll get rich."
Also known as Promo-Driven Culture
Three Ways to Get Paid (2018) (jasonzweig.com)
is over here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48373054
> 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.
Does anyone know uptake rates for these features? Are they actually hated? Or just hated by a vocal minority?
Sorry 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.)
> 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.
> 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.
So much like Clippy.
I 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.
What 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.
You 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
> 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.
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Maybe 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
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Seems 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.
Most of the reason why I still use Gmail is because IMAP is free. Otherwise I'd be on Protonmail.
I 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?
> [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.
I 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.