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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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?
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.
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.
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 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.
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 :)
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"?
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
> 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.
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."
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.
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.
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).
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.
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).
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.
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.
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+.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> “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".
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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 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.
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.
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
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.
Don't worry, they are switching to mosquito based bio warfare. Gates et al released mosquitos in Florida, and that cratered the bird population which allowed pest to take over citrus trees and 75 percent of the orange crops were lost with no way to fight that pest other than the birds whose primary food source was mosquitos (true story)
Now Google wants to do it with ten or 100 times the mosquitos in California, depending on your source for how many the bird hating citrus despising cabal released in Florida a few years ago
It could be worse. They could think you were a bird and want to starve you, or think you were a bird watcher or citrus fruit grower and want to ruin your hobby and business.
Thank you for ditching them. The world is a better place every time somebody degoogles themselves. If there was a degoogled Android option, it would be great. We need the EU to mandate driver packs for AOSP for every phone instead of just for the Google Android.
They have joined super villains and tech retardery and it is good to see people standing against it. They want to be the self driving taxi bird starving dystopia makers where even your relatives pretend to talk to you via an AI intercessor. They have gone Total Recall and the admin failed to break them up when it had the opportunity so now we get the love child of the asshats from the corporation in Blade Runner and those aliens from Battle Field Earth deciding the fate of America.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Doesn’t happen on mac either, right?
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.
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.
Trick is to use the newest distro release with previous cycle hardware
Apple does this as well with MacOS update notifications
It’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.
> 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.
> 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€.
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.
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 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.
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 :)
Settings->See all settings->General
Scroll down to:
Grammar suggestions off
Spelling suggestions off
Writing suggestions off (probably the one you want)
Out of interest - do you trust google reading all your emails? What do you think about privacy?
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 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.
The tastelessness has been creeping in
We’ve all grown out of that cliche. Literally every OS is opinionated.
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.
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 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
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
It's like Google Plus buttons and integrations everywhere but with AI.
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.
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.
You can turn off the "smart" features in the settings page for gmail. I did this and find it to be much more usable!
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
The problem? Life imitates art.
That description would make for a good definition of “anti-art”. Which also describes the output of LLMs.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
too similar to the ads they'd like to allow through?
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.
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).
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.
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
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.
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.
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+.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> “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.
> 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.
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.
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.
I'm honestly surprised they didn't reread the 2009 Gmail Autopilot April Fools Day joke in earnest.
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.
> 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.
Fastmail. It’s covered at the bottom of the post.
Fastmail
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.
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.)
Death by a thousand cuts.
Death by a thousand OKRs.
> 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 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.
"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.
[0] https://jasonzweig.com/three-ways-to-get-paid/
Even Clippy had more respect for the user: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_Assistant
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.
So much like Clippy.
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.
> 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.
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
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.
Don't worry, they are switching to mosquito based bio warfare. Gates et al released mosquitos in Florida, and that cratered the bird population which allowed pest to take over citrus trees and 75 percent of the orange crops were lost with no way to fight that pest other than the birds whose primary food source was mosquitos (true story)
Now Google wants to do it with ten or 100 times the mosquitos in California, depending on your source for how many the bird hating citrus despising cabal released in Florida a few years ago
It could be worse. They could think you were a bird and want to starve you, or think you were a bird watcher or citrus fruit grower and want to ruin your hobby and business.
Thank you for ditching them. The world is a better place every time somebody degoogles themselves. If there was a degoogled Android option, it would be great. We need the EU to mandate driver packs for AOSP for every phone instead of just for the Google Android.
They have joined super villains and tech retardery and it is good to see people standing against it. They want to be the self driving taxi bird starving dystopia makers where even your relatives pretend to talk to you via an AI intercessor. They have gone Total Recall and the admin failed to break them up when it had the opportunity so now we get the love child of the asshats from the corporation in Blade Runner and those aliens from Battle Field Earth deciding the fate of America.