Gmail thinks I'm stupid, so I left

https://moddedbear.com/gmail-thinks-im-stupid-so-i-left

by speckx • 2 months ago

1193 814 2 months ago

moddedbear.com

hparadiz• 2 months ago

Death by a thousand cuts.

franze2• 2 months ago

Death by a thousand OKRs.

kordlessagain• 2 months ago

LinkedIn (the company not the other users) thinks I'm stupid, so I also left it.

franze2• 2 months ago

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.

bostik• 2 months ago

The problem? Life imitates art.

antonvs• 2 months ago

That description would make for a good definition of “anti-art”. Which also describes the output of LLMs.

rurp2• 2 months ago

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.

rsynnott3• 2 months ago

The fascinating thing about LinkedIn is how little LLMs have changed it; even before LLMs, most LinkedIn content was written is that awful inane botslop style.

computerjoe3143• 2 months ago

The problem is that everybody is told they need to have LinkedIn to get a job in the current market. My college's career department told me I was not going to succeed without it, so I reluctantly created a profile. But I don't want to have one!

macintux2• 2 months ago

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.

Wingman4l7• 2 months ago

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"?

Forgeties792• 2 months ago

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.

mohamedkoubaa3• 2 months ago

Yes. We expect the company that prides itself on having taste to avoid doing tasteless things.

supertroop3• 2 months ago

We’ve all grown out of that cliche. Literally every OS is opinionated.

lemonish97• 2 months ago

Looking at the next iOS rumors, I think it's inevitable.

kibwen• 2 months ago

Looking at the way the stock market rewards companies that brainlessly shove AI into everything under the sun, I know it's inevitable.

drnick14• 2 months ago

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.

macintux2• 2 months ago

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.

flux3125• 2 months ago

They'll not only do it, but they'll also wrap it in a huge fat rounded border

dbvn• 2 months ago

Don't worry, Apple has been watching for a decade plus. And it seems they will continue just watching

thesuitonym2• 2 months ago

Given that Apple recently started putting ads in Maps, I have no faith in them anymore.

Hnrobert422• 2 months ago

I was a littLe annoyed by that, too, but mostly because there isn't an option to pay for an ad-free experience.

apparent3• 2 months ago

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.

gowld• 2 months ago

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?

stonogo• 2 months ago

The frustrating part is the seem to do that already, except for these obvious spam messages.

zamadatix• 2 months ago

a clear attempt to allow unsubscribe without using the word

I would have assumed it was primarily an attempt at getting you to verify the address is a real, monitored inbox. I guess it's probably a 2 birds with one stone kind of thing, lie about a way to unsubscribe to get off the spam filter and mark the email as a prime target for other domains.

n-barraclough2• 2 months ago

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.

glaslong• 2 months ago

too similar to the ads they'd like to allow through?

ceejayoz2• 2 months ago

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.

saalweachter• 2 months ago

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.

diegocg• 2 months ago

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.

PaulHoule• 2 months ago

There is a reason for it. They don't want you to receive messages from anyone who doesn't use gmail!

xp847• 2 months ago

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."

apparent3• 2 months ago

Oh for sure. I have even been solicited by companies that do such a thing, and brag about how they reword every email so it doesn't get flagged as spam.

Zardoz842• 2 months ago

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.

fzzzy• 2 months ago

There is no other person. You get all email to all of the same address regardless of the number of dots.

ryanmcbride• 2 months ago

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.

jfengel• 2 months ago

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?

berkes• 2 months ago

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.

Terr_• 2 months ago

It might not fit every requirement to call it a cartel, but certainly that word is somewhere in the right direction.

benibela• 2 months ago

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

insane_dreamer• 2 months ago

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.

HoldOnAMinute• 2 months ago

"Lie to people who want to be lied to, and you’ll get rich."

Also known as Promo-Driven Culture

rationalist• 2 months ago

There are three ways to make a living:
1) Lie to people who want to be lied to, and you’ll get rich.
2) Tell the truth to those who want the truth, and you’ll make a living.
3) Tell the truth to those who want to be lied to, and you’ll go broke.

That's depressing.

[0] https://jasonzweig.com/three-ways-to-get-paid/

etiam• 2 months ago

Three Ways to Get Paid (2018) (jasonzweig.com)

is over here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48373054

Eisenstein• 2 months ago

Is this a test feature? I don't see it in my gmail.

maupin• 2 months ago

Same. I haven't seen this. And I hope I never do unless I specifically click a button to enable it.

fantasizr• 2 months ago

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.

triMichael• 2 months ago

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.

coldpie• 2 months ago

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.

kraquepype2• 2 months ago

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.

bossyTeacher2• 2 months ago

It's hilarious seeing people complain about Microsoft when a free alternative exists. Humans are really curious creatures.

supertroop3• 2 months ago

Doesn’t happen on mac either, right?

andrekandre2• 2 months ago

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

PennRobotics2• 2 months ago

I wish I could fully agree. Canonical is a bit pushy: "Ubuntu Pro / ESM subscription will make your machine safer! and it is convenient mega free!! ((for non-business uses))"

Workplace very strictly requires Ubuntu LTS for toolchain & compatibility reasons, otherwise I'd run Debian or Fedora or Tumbleweed with Ubuntu containers/VMs where needed.

Nonetheless, Linux popups and promotions (even from enterprise distros) are not nearly as bad as the Windows 11 experience.

bee_rider• 2 months ago

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.

PyWoody• 2 months ago

  Does Microsoft understand consent?
  
  [ ] Yes
  [ ] Ask again later

1e1a• 2 months ago

Apple does this as well with MacOS update notifications

  Upgrade to MacOS Tahoe?
  
  [ ] Yes
  [ ] Remind me later

drnick14• 2 months ago

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.

xp847• 2 months ago

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.

drnick14• 2 months ago

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.

efreak2• 2 months ago

3 is a result of Gmail's imap implementation, and can be squarely blamed on Google. They did this intentionally. Instead of mapping the your tags as imap labels, they mapped them as a folder structure.

While it certainly shouldn't be necessary, I do feel like it should be possible to work around this in a mail client, however; don't emails these days all have unique ids? If not, storing a hash of the message content+headers/timestamps for every message should be enough to keep a local index of what each message is tagged as (given the implementation where each message shows up in multiple places). I can somewhat understand Thunderbird not wanting to make compatibility shims for specific vendors poor implementations.

jacobgkau2• 2 months ago

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.

adjejmxbdjdn• 2 months ago

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.

kgwxd2• 2 months ago

Even Clippy had more respect for the user: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_Assistant

pdpi• 2 months ago

“Tab to improve”. What I’ve written so far isn’t up to Gmail’s standards, it seems.

I find this infuriating. I have my own voice, my own writing style, and I deliberately use some "bad" writing tropes for effect. For any non-trivial amount of writing (read: anything with actual paragraphs), I'm liable to spend as much time editing as I am writing out the first draft, to make sure my writing conveys the message I want it to.

"Tab to improve" is, effectively, "tab to delete my own personality".

metalliqaz• 2 months ago

Somehow MS Word's grammar check does this without being offensive about it.

kgwxd2• 2 months ago

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.

platevoltage3• 2 months ago

Most of the reason why I still use Gmail is because IMAP is free. Otherwise I'd be on Protonmail.

lpolovets• 2 months ago

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.

fellowniusmonk• 2 months ago

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.

rjh292• 2 months ago

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.

tartoran2• 2 months ago

I chose typing every time.

lexoj• 2 months ago

That chat history dark pattern is the main reason I never use Gemini. Its a shame.

gs173• 2 months ago

Which dark pattern is that?

computerjoe3143• 2 months ago

Their AI push is what convinced me to leave gmail and go buy my own domain. I don't want it.

soperj• 2 months ago

what do you use as your client?

vasco• 2 months ago

It's like Google Plus buttons and integrations everywhere but with AI.

gadders• 2 months ago

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.

verdverm2• 2 months ago

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

SV_BubbleTime• 2 months ago

The message you’re sending is that you think I’m not capable of reading and writing my own emails.

I mean… this is probably true for a great number of people. Perhaps the majority and they are statistically correct to assume.

But yes, fuck Gmail pushing this shit so hard by default.

masfuerte• 2 months ago

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.

tartoran2• 2 months ago

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+.

jacobgkau2• 2 months ago

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.

joemi• 2 months ago

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?

johnQdeveloper• 2 months ago

I don't think you can turn them off as a free gmail user.

kyrra• 2 months ago

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.

zkmon2• 2 months ago

so I left

to where?

dexzod• 2 months ago

Fastmail

latexr3• 2 months ago

Fastmail. It’s covered at the bottom of the post.

baggachipz• 2 months ago

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.

Sebguer• 2 months ago

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.

__MatrixMan__• 2 months ago

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.

qingcharles• 2 months ago

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.

tim-tday• 2 months ago

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.

xp847• 2 months ago

"nobody left there with enough courage to stop them"

I'd add it's also that there's nobody left to compete with them, either. They own the only desktop browser that matters, and basically the entire concept of the mobile phone itself outside the US (Android), and it seems like 50% or so of the corporate email market, 80% of the consumer email market, a high percentage of the advertising market. I don't think pre-1984 AT&T had half the dominance Google does.

carlosjobim• 2 months ago

I'd add it's also that there's nobody left to compete with them, either.

Except for the largest and most profitable company in the world, that is.

nyeah• 2 months ago

So much like Clippy.

glerk4• 2 months ago

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.

bananamogul• 2 months ago

Settings->See all settings->General

Scroll down to:

Grammar suggestions off

Spelling suggestions off

Writing suggestions off (probably the one you want)

glerk4• 2 months ago

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.

scrollop2• 2 months ago

Out of interest - do you trust google reading all your emails? What do you think about privacy?

awkwardpotato• 2 months ago

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.

glerk4• 2 months ago

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.

Meekro• 2 months ago

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.

dirkc• 2 months ago

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 :)

Zambyte4• 2 months ago

I think we’re all used to user-hostile software these days [...]

Malware. Call it what it is. Software that intentionally subverts and acts against the user’s intent is malware. It’s important to call malware what it is because people don’t even realize they shouldn’t use it when it’s not called malware. Instead, they get "used to" using malware.

baggy_trough4• 2 months ago

Please do not call it malware, because it is not. It is just bad software UI.

aprentic2• 2 months ago

Why not?

It's a software feature designed to benefit Google at the expense of the user.

3form2• 2 months ago

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.

xerox13ster• 2 months ago

ok then.

Malformed Software. or, malware.

Dylan168078• 2 months ago

Between it being a website and harassment being the only harm, I don't think the term "malware" fits.

tardedmeme5• 2 months ago

Do casual computer users use the word "malware"? I think people only know the term "virus" but when I say "windows is a computer virus" everyone thinks I'm insane.

Zambyte4• 2 months ago

"Computer virus" is the wrong term, because it (neither Windows nor Gmail) does not spread and replicate itself through technical means. Computer viruses are a subset of malware, and it is more correct to say the general term in this case.

jedberg• 2 months ago

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.

ngriffiths• 2 months ago

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.

green_wheel• 2 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?

thedanbob2• 2 months ago

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).

neogodless2• 2 months ago

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.

darkwater• 2 months ago

You need to add VAT to the Fastmail price, I just renewed 1 year for exactly 60€.

xigoi• 2 months ago

purelymail.com: $10.00*

unlimited** storage, unlimited accounts, unlimited domains

*or possibly less if you choose pay-per-use pricing

**soft limit if you use way too much

dhdjddhx• 2 months ago

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.

sebastiennight3• 2 months ago

My anecdotal experience has been the opposite. We used to have an old email domain which, due to Google workspace misconfiguration, had terrible deliverability. Switching to Proton solved all our problems on that side.

upofadown2• 2 months ago

Deliverability issues with which email provider(s)? Often times it turns out the problem is just with Gmail.

foresterre• 2 months ago

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.

(1) https://proton.me/support/snooze-emails

dsissitka• 2 months ago

Proton apps are very janky in comparison. For example:

  You open Proton Mail.

  You'd like to read the second email in your inbox so you hit J a couple times.

  Nothing happens.

  J/K don't work unless an email is already selected so you use your mouse instead.

  You hit T to move the email to the trash.

  You'd like to read the next email so you hit J.

  Nothing happens.

  Hitting T didn't leave you with a selected email so J/K don't work.

There are a lot of issues like this.

mplanchard• 2 months ago

I use and like proton for my custom domain. Haven’t used fast mail though so I can’t compare. I like that messages to other proton users are automatically encrypted.

atoav• 2 months ago

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

latexr3• 2 months ago

I’m interested in what other people in a similar position have done.

I have left Gmail (everything Google, really, that was the last one) years ago when they went back on their word of grandfathered lifetime access to a free email inbox with a custom domain. They did go back on that going back near the end of the deadline, but by then I had already deleted my account.

I switched to iCloud+, because it was the cheapest option I found (0.99€/month) and it includes other niceties such as 50GB iCloud Drive storage, iCloud Private Relay, and Hide My Email. So far, no regrets. It may not have all the features of other email hosts, but it’s enough for my needs and the price with the extras make up for it.

mdavidn• 2 months ago

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?

xg15• 2 months ago

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?

Henchman215• 2 months ago

Turning creative developers into consumption machines.

protoster• 2 months ago

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.

dyauspitr2• 2 months ago

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.

saint_yossarian• 2 months ago

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

dyauspitr2• 2 months ago

Thank you. I’m aware but I’m referring to what they show on their actual clean up tool attached to the you’re approaching your storage limit message. It’s an infuriating dark pattern.

romanhn• 2 months 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).

minraws3• 2 months ago

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.

supertroop3• 2 months ago

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.

minraws3• 2 months ago

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

thedanbob2• 2 months ago

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.

GuinansEyebrows• 2 months ago

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.

fsckboy• 2 months ago

switching banks and govt accounts is easy. getting people's address books to switch is hard

LeifCarrotson• 2 months ago

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.

minraws3• 2 months ago

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..

2sk21• 2 months ago

You can turn off the "smart" features in the settings page for gmail. I did this and find it to be much more usable!

ibejoeb• 2 months ago

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.

Tor311• 2 months ago

I use filters for categorization, where neeeded. Been doing that for years and it does what I need. I don't see any value in google doing it for me, when I can set the filters just as I want them.

n-barraclough2• 2 months ago

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.

rurp2• 2 months ago

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.

dreambigwrkhard• 2 months ago

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.)

BeetleB2• 2 months ago

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.

neogodless2• 2 months ago

Sure, I could switch to a different mail client and never see any of these language model features, but my experience these past months has left such a bad taste that all I’m looking for now is a clean break.

BeetleB2• 2 months ago

It took that long for the experience to degrade?!

parliament32• 2 months ago

the unsolicited summaries and auto replies are a means of artificially inflating the usage metrics for the language model features

This, I think, is the part that irks me the most. Companies adding token-usage-KPIs for engineering is one thing, but when they have to resort to deliberately tricking users into using their slop-generators.. something has gone very wrong, and they're trying very, very hard to make it seem like it's not so.

My personal pet peeve is Copilot in Teams. Did you know, if you turn off Copilot in Teams at an org level, it disables meeting recording entirely? Ignoring that meeting recording has been a core feature dating way back before Copilot-anything, I can't fantom any possible reason why recording a video of a meeting would require an LLM. Transcription, maybe I could see, but that feature is easily togglable with or without Copilot. But if you want to record a meeting, for whatever reason, you need to have Copilot on.

Shenanigans like this is why user counts for LLM features should always be taken with a grain of salt.

scrollop2• 2 months ago

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.

lukan• 2 months ago

Convenience. Also I don't really communicate private stuff over gmail, I have signal for that.

danielhep• 2 months ago

I did the same except switched to fastmail. I love it, it’s such a great service.

AgentME• 2 months ago

Gmail stopped using email contents for ad targeting in 2017.

projektfu• 2 months ago

I'm honestly surprised they didn't reread the 2009 Gmail Autopilot April Fools Day joke in earnest.

themafia• 2 months ago

The message you’re sending is that you think I’m not capable of reading and writing my own emails.

The message they are sending is you, as a user, do not matter to them. Only the analytics and KPIs do.

They spent lavishly on this crap without asking if anyone actually wanted it first. Now they're stuck with a bad investment and no uptake.

As usual, in the world of corporate power, you are just the inconvenient flotsam that occasionally rises to the top.

dddddaviddddd• 2 months ago

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).

verdverm2• 2 months ago

agents + EXA has replaced almost all of my search now, except when I muscle memory it

vrganj• 2 months ago

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.

einpoklum2• 2 months ago

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.

dreamcompiler• 2 months ago

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.

ddosmax556• 2 months ago

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.

why_at• 2 months ago

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.

sebmellen2• 2 months ago

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.

munk-a8• 2 months ago

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.

setopt• 2 months ago

Then there’s probably some underlying belief that more volume shows more effort

Hopefully, LLMs will kill that attitude in the long run

not_a_bot_4sho• 2 months ago

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

singleshot_• 2 months ago

LLM-written emails are too wordy. But maybe people think that’s what a good email is.

(Did an LLM write your post?)

edoceo3• 2 months ago

more volume shows more effort

I didn't have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead. - M. Twain

conductr6• 2 months ago

It seems to me like adoption of AI in the workplace has become mostly 1) authorship of verbose emails and 2) summarizing verbose emails for non-tech industries

LinXitoW• 2 months ago

Well, business english IS annoyingly verbose and full of empty phrases. It would be cool if we could dispense with vapid pleasantries.

I'm certainly not going to be the first to stake my job or my promotion on that particular hill. So I can fully understand why people will still turn "We need the database changes ASAP, you promised they'd be done. Get it done!" into half a page of drivel.

mrtksn• 2 months ago

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.

munk-a8• 2 months ago

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.

falsepositive44• 2 months ago

Couldn't figure out if this reply was serious or sarcastic. If the latter, then it's hilarious.

0x3f• 2 months ago

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.

altmanaltman• 2 months ago

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.

Almondioco2• 2 months ago

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.

jrowen• 2 months ago

It's insecurity. They worry they might be saying something dumb and the LLM gives them assurance that it sounds "better" and "more professional."

boelboel• 2 months ago

And they will just get worse at writing anything by depending on it. Soon enough practically nobody will be able to write.

al_borland6• 2 months ago

It’s a false assurance. LLMs say dumb things all the time.

AlienRobot• 2 months ago

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.

hn_throwaway_99• 2 months ago

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."

anal_reactor• 2 months ago

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.

ssl-3• 2 months ago

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.

mcphage• 2 months ago

It's one thing if you don't speak English well and could use some help making yourself understood

If someone reading does this, please, do not. Imperfect English is a lot more pleasant to read than AI slop. It will not sound better, it will sound worse.

StefanBatory• 2 months ago

Everyone says so, and then when you make even a single mistake in grammar, orthography or use weird phrasing, your entire point is disregarded.

And currently many phrases we've been taught to use for formality are being seen as a sign of LLM usage...

goodmythical• 2 months ago

I think you might be suffering from a little bit of bias concerning your own comfort with written english with regard to the general population's comfort with written english.

I had a high school teacher (algebra II), my favorite coincidentally, who was actually functionally illiterate. He knew some words, and had a solid understanding of the alphabet, but ask him to parse a sentence or god forbid an essay, and he was completely lost.

He was a native born american, english as only language, and simply could not interact with the written language. If he could have written (in 2009) "give 20 question test for week 1 algebra II student with answer guide" he'd have gotten (based on the prompt I just submitted):

Week 1 — Algebra II: 20 Practice Questions

    Simplify: 3(x + 4) − 2(2x − 5).
    Solve for x: 5x − 7 = 2x + 11.
    Solve: 2(x − 3) = 3(x + 1).
    Solve and check: (x/4) + 5 = 11.
    Factor: x^2 + 5x + 6.
    Factor: 4x^2 − 9.
    Factor completely: x^2 − 6x + 9.
    Multiply and simplify: (2x − 3)(x + 4).
    Expand: (x + 2)^2.
    Solve quadratic by factoring: x^2 − x − 12 = 0.
    Use the quadratic formula to solve: x^2 + 4x + 1 = 0.
    Simplify: (3x^2y)(2xy^3).
    Simplify: (x^5)/(x^2).
    Solve for x: 2^(x+1) = 16.
    Evaluate: f(x) = 2x^2 − 3x + 1; find f(2).
    Write equation of a line in slope-intercept form with slope 3 and y-intercept −2.
    Find slope of the line through points (1, 4) and (5, −2).
    Solve the system by substitution: y = 2x + 1 and 3x − y = 4.
    Solve the system by elimination: 2x + 3y = 7 and 4x − 3y = 5.
    Simplify and write in simplest radical form: sqrt(50).

Answer Key

    3x + 12 − 4x + 10 = −x + 22
    5x − 2x = 11 + 7 → 3x = 18 → x = 6
    2x − 6 = 3x + 3 → −6 − 3 = x → x = −9
    x/4 = 6 → x = 24
    (x + 2)(x + 3)
    (2x − 3)(2x + 3)
    (x − 3)^2
    2x^2 + 8x − 3x − 12 = 2x^2 + 5x − 12
    x^2 + 4x + 4
    (x − 4)(x + 3) = 0 → x = 4 or x = −3
    x = [−4 ± sqrt(16 − 4)]/2 = [−4 ± sqrt(12)]/2 = [−4 ± 2√3]/2 = −2 ± √3
    6x^3y^4
    x^3 (assuming x ≠ 0)
    2^(x+1) = 16 = 2^4 → x + 1 = 4 → x = 3
    f(2) = 2(4) − 3(2) + 1 = 8 − 6 + 1 = 3
    y = 3x − 2
    slope = (−2 − 4)/(5 − 1) = (−6)/4 = −3/2
    Substitute y: 3x − (2x + 1) = 4 → 3x − 2x − 1 = 4 → x = 5 → y = 2(5)+1 = 11
    Add equations: (2x+3y)+(4x−3y)=7+5 → 6x = 12 → x = 2. Then 2(2)+3y=7 → 4+3y=7 → 3y=3 → y=1
    sqrt(50) = sqrt(25·2) = 5√2

I'm sure there are many more accesibility stories surrounding these fancy auto-completes.

minitech• 2 months ago

This comment is confusing to me on so many levels. What’s with the tangent(?) about a math test your algebra teacher could have generated? Did you bring up an illiterate teacher (extreme outlier) as evidence that the general population has low comfort with written English, or…? (I’m going to resist getting into the rest of the tangent, but it’s really impressively densely perplexing.)

(edit: I’m not going to resist)

If he could have written (in 2009) "give 20 question test for week 1 algebra II student with answer guide"

Is the “could” here just about AI not existing back then, or does “could not interact with the written language” imply that he could not have written this prompt? Why would he need the output, given that most of it is math? (If we assume he can speech-to-text the prompt, why can’t he do the same for other writing?) If the level of writing of “Write equation of a line in slope-intercept form with slope 3 and y-intercept −2” is the challenge, is he able to read it? What if the output is wrong – who’s going to verify it? Are you presenting this as a good thing? How did/would he grade handwritten written-answer questions?

al_borland6• 2 months ago

People won’t get better if they don’t use it. These LLMs are a crutch that will not just not people from getting better, but any skills they do have will atrophy without use.

How can anyone even write a proper prompt, or understand if the answer is correct, without being literate? I’ve been noticing on YouTube where people are delivering scripts that are clearly AI written. It makes me question if they are able to read something, understand it, and put it in their own words. This seems like a fundamental skill any adult should have, especially if they are trying to make a living giving advice to others, as was the case with these videos.

I’d also think literacy should be a basic requirement for a teacher, regardless of the subject. If we don’t hold that standard for our teachers, how can we expect it of our students? Continuously lowering standards is not helping anyone in the long run. It hurts the individual and society as a whole.

Dylan168078• 2 months ago

What does this have to do with emails. The comment you replied to didn't say to purge all LLMs so I see basically no connection.

VladVladikoff• 2 months ago

Honest answer, I’m sort of not neurotypical, not formally diagnosed but enough people in my life have gone out of their way to inform me, and so while I do still write emails myself, if it’s for work I usually dump my email into an LLM before sending it and just ask for some minor edits where I could be misconstrued as being rude or offensive. It’s stuff I would normally not notice, but other people take issue with my overtly direct nature of speaking.

NagatoYuzuru2• 2 months ago

As a non native English speaker, letting an LLM translate my emails is actually a sweet trap that’s all too easy to fall into. But Gemini in Gmail DOESN’T SUPPORT non English input. What’s the point of this thing?

duskdozer• 2 months ago

As a non native English speaker, letting an LLM translate my emails is actually a sweet trap that’s all too easy to fall into.

There's a big difference between running your input through DeepL and asking [ChatGPT] to rewrite it. I don't know how we got to the latter being the go-to

jeroenhd2• 2 months ago

21% of Americans are functionally illiterate. 54% of Americans read below a 6th grade level.

Things that seem trivial to someone well-read can be insurmountable tasks for millions of people.

Those people may do fine day to day, you don't need to write all that many emails for many if not most jobs, but when they do need to get their intentions across, things might get dicy.

Or course this solution is far from perfect. If you use LLMs to word your message because you're not very proficient in reading or writing, you may not understand what the output is saying, so you can't verify that it didn't misinterpret you.

voidUpdate2• 2 months ago

You have to be able to write enough to prompt an LLM. So why not just send the prompt, since that's what you actually said?

itake• 2 months ago

speaking is faster than typing. My current process is:

1. Use Google Eloquent or directly into ChatGPT to dictate the email.

2. Then ask AI to polish, simplify, summarize, and I provide my writing style [0].

That gets sent to the user. I am very careful to not allow the AI to write too much.

The alternative is I spend 20+ minutes writing and re-writing the email.

[0] https://www.kcoleman.me/writing/slack/2023/03/11/writing-sty...

gblargg• 2 months ago

As an aside, using an LLM results in a post that's all black text, except a couple of colorful emojis that jump out:

Speak with confidence. “I think that I can possibly consider agreeing” . Don’t share weak decisions or opinions. Either agree, or disagree.

When I see those I mentally downgrade the whole text.

Derbasti• 2 months ago

More pointedly, instead of prompting the AI to write something, just send the prompt. It will be concise and pointed, exactly what a message should be.

kakacik• 2 months ago

Wife is a GP and has to frequently write emails to either insurances or lawyers/judges. All done in french which is a messy language full of obsolete over-the-top completely dishonest empty fluff, but native speakers tend to get quickly offended if its missing, done by non-native speaker. Mistakes can easily have legal consequences.

She uses chatgpt for such with appropriate checks afterwards, all the time. It saves her tons of time, and time is money, time is life spent with kids instead of useless bureaucratic work.

I have tons of similar stories, friends (surgeons, radiologists, all non-native speakers) using chatgpt to write some official application for work permits, motivation letters etc. Just because you don't have certain way of working or work situation doesn't mean its valid for all of us.

tardedmeme5• 2 months ago

I think it's a case of projection. Megatech CEOs feel that avoiding interactions with peons is the most important thing, so they add this feature assuming that everyone else also wants that.

obvi8• 2 months ago

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?

ajross• 2 months ago

[Stupid Other People] enjoy pissing away their own time ingesting the [LLM] output

Stop. Yes yes, you are a fine writer with excellent communication skills. You would never stoop so low as to allow a mere machine to write for you, and no such device is going to have anything but the most banal suggestions you would accept (I mean, even the most elite of us make the occasional typo, amirite?).

Many people (most, really) hate writing. It's just difficult, for the same reason that you probably avoid, I dunno, dancing or public performance. People have different skills.

And people who hate writing and know they aren't that great at it still know that their email is likely to land in the inbox of a snob like you. So... they ask for help where they can get it.

To wit: be nice. You're letting your ego drive you to some unpleasant places. There's a fine line between chuckling at inappropriately-AI-enhanced communication and just being an asshole.

aragilar• 2 months ago

I hate writing, but I don't send LLM output, because I'm not the asshole who sends junk.

univocal• 2 months ago

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.

serial_dev3• 2 months ago

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.

ufmace• 2 months ago

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.

conductr6• 2 months ago

Some human in the loop is to be expected, that’s a win on my AI engagement kpis /s

agiacalone• 2 months ago

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”.

Tor311• 2 months ago

Research on LLMs show that they so far can't summarize. They fake it by just extracting stuff, i.e. making the text shorter. They, as you found, can't understand intent. Or what's actually important. I never read summaries generated by AIs, it's a waste of time, and worse.

phyzix57612• 2 months ago

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.

dude250711• 2 months ago

Did you mean investor engagement perhaps? Or some promotion committee engagement? AI is Google+ 2.0.

phyzix57612• 2 months ago

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.

JumpCrisscross• 2 months ago

Does anyone know uptake rates for these features? Are they actually hated? Or just hated by a vocal minority?

croisillon• 2 months ago

and you had to be quite the hardcore google-fan to still use gmail in the year of 2000 and 26

Waterluvian2• 2 months ago

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.”

lstodd• 2 months ago

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.

Waterluvian2• 2 months ago

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.

prmoustache• 2 months ago

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.

ian_j_butler• 2 months ago

I think we’re all used to user-hostile software these days, but this is the first time I’ve experienced software that feels like it’s actively trying to be disrespectful.

Always wild to hear people say stuff like this. First, all user-hostility is clearly disrespectful by definition. Second, almost all software, even the free stuff, is insanely user-hostile. We are all so completely frog-boiled on this it's not even funny. Yes, even people in tech and maybe especially people in tech.

Everyone reading this has probably used 10 applications today that are completely ignoring instructions to disable updates/telemetry if they even bothered to lie to you that this is possible. IOS has years-old "bugs" where turning off voice control isn't actually possible, official docs are gas-lighting you, and the settings are just ignored.. so people just deal with paused music that inconsistently triggers on 1/5 of your sneezes or coughs and get used to it. Spotify performance/ux/sanity has been completely degraded for months now. Web-browsers routinely force updates to require multi-gig downloads of AI models, and before that, they had on-and-off regressions in basic stuff like copy/paste for multiple years. Your popup-blocker that helps you to stay sane feels fine about popping up some shit that tells you how many pop-ups it freaking blocked. This is just my last 10 minutes. You can dig into any one of these problems, lose 45m on some janky fix, and also know for sure that you'll need to spend the same effort on some related goddamned problem less than a week later.

Besides the "ads for paying customers" type of stuff, this drip-drip of millions and millions of little points of persistent friction never stops. You think you broke it or you are going crazy until you deep-dive the bug reports or the reddit threads and realize it's all gas-lighting, and someone has made a choice. If the choice wasn't about disrespectful surveillance, auto-updates, or profit-maxxing enshittification then it's a greenhorn developer refactoring something for devx or aesthetics over UX, and the breakage didn't even happen in service of a real feature.

You try to freeze the apps with snap or containers or whatever for some stability hoping to GTFO the fix-it-again treadmill. You assert proudly that "Computers work for me, I don't work for them!" It's smoother for a while but there's always something. A phone-home with a suddenly bad endpoint, a missing remote tag/version gets yanked, or the operating system itself will betray you with yet-another iteration of unnecessary path-changing nonsense that breaks everything anyway.

Although they are opposites in every other way, Linus and Bezos may be the last living bosses that valued stability, backwards compatibility, and not fucking up shit that works fine. When they are gone god help us all.

tzs• 2 months ago

Afterward, I go to compose a new message. A colorful animation steals my focus for a second highlighting a new “help me write” button. I ignore it and move on to filling in the recipients and subject line.

Does it do this animation every time you try to compose a new message, or is it just the first time you are given the button?

(I couldn't simply look at my own gmail to see, because I tried that but mine does not have it. I'm guessing it is either something they are gradually rolling out or it is something only for people who are paying for Google services).

manoDev• 2 months ago

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.

fer• 2 months ago

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.

serial_dev3• 2 months ago

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.

iamacyborg• 2 months ago

That won’t help a PM hit their bonus

serial_dev3• 2 months ago

30% open rate, huge success! Yeah because I keep clicking on it accidentally!!

McGlockenshire• 2 months ago

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.

baliex• 2 months ago

I focus the message box to draft a reply, but there’s already one there. It was also generated by the language model. I delete it, replacing it with my own.

The really, really scary thing is how uncommon this approach is. I think.

My assumption is that most people roll with automated pre-written reply. Maybe tweaking a few things here and there, but ultimately preferring the all-too-convenient trade-off of the robots having written something close enough to what they wanted to say, using "better" words. Even when what they would have written themselves would have had some personality, even if it was their own flawed human one.

For the record, I am 100% with you on your approach (on the odd occasion that I must use gmail).

mvkel• 2 months ago

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.

vonunov3• 2 months ago

and will be ranked on how deeply the integration goes.

Oh, that must be why the Gmail web interface has so many spans that contain nothing but another span (including the span containing the "Press / to help me write" placeholder text in the message body area when replying). Here you go, boss, it's deeper now!

ok_dad• 2 months ago

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.

computably• 2 months ago

but this is the first time I’ve experienced software that feels like it’s actively trying to be disrespectful

It sounds like they use plenty of software so they must be incredibly lucky, picky, or both.

arjie2• 2 months ago

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.

shevy-java2• 2 months ago

Why do people have to go to this, to turn off the AI slop?

Bang2Bay• 2 months ago

is gmail a paid service?

munk-a8• 2 months ago

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!

highpost• 2 months ago

That was ... easy.

skywhopper• 2 months ago

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.

WarOnPrivacy5• 2 months ago

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"

...prompt, crapped onto every new email. Find the lever to disable that; I dare you.

lern_too_spel• 2 months ago

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.

Tor311• 2 months ago

I never see any "Press / for.." or anything like that. I rejected all the 'smart' features when gmail one day popped up an announcement about them.

tomodachi94• 2 months ago

Unfortunately, this also turns off the Primary/Promotions/Social/Updates categorization.

arjie2• 2 months ago

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.

reddalo8• 2 months ago

Disabling those Primary/Promotions/etc. tabs is the first thing I do whenever I setup a new Gmail account.

I just want to see my inbox, I don't trust an AI filter to sort emails for me.

Tor311• 2 months ago

I've seen those categorizations used, and to me they're totally useless. I instead filter messages in the Filter settings, and apply labels and other things as I wish. This works exactly as I need it, unlike the Google categorizations.

noncoml• 2 months ago

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.

sneak• 2 months ago

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.

tokenomics• 2 months ago

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.

varun_ch• 2 months ago

this looks like it's set by your org? https://varun.ch/posts/your-company/

Almondioco2• 2 months ago

Nothing changed for me. I do not really recognize this tab suggestion and besides that, i do not see anything has changed.

shevy-java2• 2 months ago

Congrats to Google, really. They’ve done a decent job at keeping Gmail stable over the many years I’ve used it. Which is why even I am impressed by how quickly they were able to get me to pack up and leave.

I went the de-google route years ago already. Granted, I am still using some Google services, but I am not at all emotionally attached to it in any way. If Google were to go extinct tomorrow, I would be super-happy, and I am also 100% certain of that, no matter which repercussion would come as a result. Youtube gone? No problem if Google is also gone. Besides, some video site would emerge after that anyway, so really - who needs Google? Let's get rid of it already. It was an annoying adCompany for many years. Now it is an AI adSlop company.

WarOnPrivacy5• 2 months ago

    I focus the message body area and underneath my cursor appears
    the message “Press / for Help me write”.

I got this and went a bit mad pushing every Gmail lever there was. Eventually I worked out that the Chrome browser was puking this onto my unwritten Gmail messages.

I had been using Chrome for just Gmail, because of Gmail's sabotagey hostility toward Firefox. On my 10+ machines I swapped Chrome for Bromium, ungoogled Chromium, Brave and a couple of others I don't recall.

quuxplusone• 2 months ago

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?

vonunov3• 2 months ago

I saw the "Press /" using Thorium (a Chromium fork). Tried to use the element picker in uBlock to get rid of it. This failed, of course, because the thing to be blocked disappears as soon as the text input area loses focus, even after I deleted every event listener that I thought could have been relevant.

In a Firefox fork (Floorp) using another Google account but with the seemingly relevant part of Gmail configuration matching, I don't see "Press /" at all. Not sure why exactly, it's a somewhat interesting question but I already went poking through dev console to write a selector for it and I'm starting to get irritated at the idea of spending any more time on it, lol

uBlock:

  mail.google.com##div[aria-label="Message Body"] span[contenteditable="false"]

or user styles / Stylus / etc.:

  div[aria-label="Message Body"] span[contenteditable="false"] { display: none !important; }

jklinger410• 2 months ago

Someone is having a case of the Mondays!

nkrisc• 2 months ago

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.

tommica2• 2 months ago

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.

JoeBOFH• 2 months ago

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.

tommica2• 2 months ago

I have 6 accounts, and no, not really any spam - ton of newsletters but that is because of me having accounts in those systems.

My spam folders do have a ton of spam, so clearly it is working at least for me.

jonplackett• 2 months ago

You can just turn all this stuff off.

ivraatiems• 2 months ago

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.

curvaturearth• 2 months ago

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.

graphememes• 2 months ago

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"

nelox• 2 months ago

At some point it will be Gmail talking to itself.

ninth_ant• 2 months ago

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.

blt• 2 months ago

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".

hagbard_c• 2 months ago

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.

jadar• 2 months ago

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.

zurtri• 2 months ago

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.

lovegrenoble• 2 months ago

100%

sunjester• 2 months ago

They are probably glad for your exit since they need so much space.

iririririr• 2 months ago

for the past decade you should have been using gmail with all the "smart" features turned off.

programmertote• 2 months ago

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.

hogwasher• 2 months ago

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.

dspillett5• 2 months ago

but ALL class action or settlement related emails get automatically chucked into to my gmail spam folder

Every now and then I get a glut of “if you bought X in timeframe Y you might be due a pay-out” junk mail, so this might be genuine false positives rather than something more sinister.

Though the cynic in me, that has been right so many times over the years wrt corporate behaviour, is inclined to agree with your much less generous assessment!

phyzome2• 2 months ago

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.

Unai• 2 months ago

If you're gonna go off-topic, I wanna join.

How absolutely terrible is the box where you write the emails in web Gmail? I get you need more features than what a simple <textarea> provides, but how can a trillion dollar company make such an absolutely broken piece of crap as the most important part of one of their key products? You delete something and the cursor goes to the end of the email. You ctrl-z and the cursor goes before the first character of the email, not before modifying a string of a completely random length. Like a year ago, and for like a month, there was an area on the right side that didn't accept any clicks at all. Native keyboard shortcuts constantly violated.

We figured out WYSIWYG decades ago, how can it be this bad? I've resorted to writing my emails on a notepad app and pasting them when they are done. I thought it had to be an issue with some browser extensions or something, because I've never heard anyone else complaining about it, but no, it really is that bad.

conductr6• 2 months ago

I’ll pile on this one. I’ve never quite figured out some of the common formatting icons they use. Text color and text background fill color I guess wrong every single time and think “why is that icon used for that”. I can never find how to edit bullet types. Simple stuff that I never struggle to locate and identify in any other application

zapatos• 2 months ago

I have a filter to never send email to the spam folder if it contains the word "settlement" in the subject, to work around this annoying issue.

0x59• 2 months ago

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.

neuropacabra2• 2 months ago

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.

dbgrman2• 2 months ago

which email client do you use?

neuropacabra2• 1 month ago

Apple Mail, I am a simple man :-)

ajkjk• 2 months ago

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.

epsteingpt2• 2 months ago

basically

dbgrman2• 2 months ago

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).

doublerabbit• 2 months ago

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.

kristianp• 2 months ago

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?

branon• 2 months ago

I'll never, ever forgive Google for killing the "Basic HTML View" client mode for Gmail.

Henchman215• 2 months ago

I’m still mad about Google Reader

LandenLove• 2 months ago

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.

lucb1e• 2 months ago

Exactly, I was also pretty unamused by Google pushing product ads into system notifications. Not the first software I stop using due to system notification ads!

Mentioned it in an off-topic company chat but the director has gotten tired of people thinking badly of Google now that we're using Google Workspace and he looks for every parallel there is to be drawn to e.g. Mozilla ("doesn't Thunderbird also show a donations call from time to time?" Yeah, when you open and use the actual program, and they are ultimately a non-profit) but the chat was dead after that... Felt a bit that I was the only person who was fairly perplexed by a legit business pushing ads in notifications

slipknotfan3• 2 months ago

you can solve the google problem: cd C: && find -type f | grep google | sudo xargs rm

and also the win11 problem:

format C:

nosioptar• 2 months ago

Why run two commands when the following will remove both google and windows in one command?

cfdisk /dev/hda && mkfs.xfs /dev/hda1 && mount /dev/hda1 /mnt/gentoo/ && chroot /mnt/gentoo/ && env-update && . /etc/profile && emerge sync && cd /usr/portage && scripts/bootsrap.sh && emerge system && emerge vim && vi /etc/fstab && emerge gentoo-dev-sources && cd /usr/src/linux && make menuconfig && make install modules_install && emerge gnome mozilla-firefox openoffice && emerge grub && cp /boot/grub/grub.conf.samp le /boot/grub/grub.conf && vi /boot/grub/grub.conf && grub && init 6

Saris• 2 months ago

Ungoogled Chromium is what I keep installed for that reason. There if I need it as a browser, but otherwise does absolutely nothing else.

Hobadee• 2 months ago

A user-agent spoofer will help with most of those "Chrome required" websites.

kizer• 2 months ago

Llm…………

cadamsdotcom8• 2 months 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.

sshine• 2 months ago

When I migrated from Gmail to Fastmail years ago, I thought Fastmail felt... less featureful.

When I rarely visit my abandoned Gmail, I can't believe I put up with the clunkiness.

Lean software stands the test of time.

Fastmail hasn't had a noteworthy UI change ever.

Minor annoyances:

  - Clicking an iPhone notification opens the app, but never brings me to the actual email
  - It is difficult to unfold the full extended header section on iPhone
  - ...I can't think of more...

It saves my drafts, it's not annoying, it has a mobile app.

I might switch away for a solution that is more affordable when hosting emails for many family members and organisations. But for a handful, I really can't recommend it enough.

FireBeyond2• 2 months ago

I use it with Spark on macOS and iOS (Spark Classic) and it just works. Archiving works fine, marking as spam actually moves and 'activates' Fastmail's training. There's email masks, aliases, the UI is always fast and responsive in the web view when I go there.

streptomycin• 2 months ago

The only thing I miss from Gmail is a "send and archive" button to save me a click when replying to emails.

vachina2• 2 months ago

Why are people accessing emails from the webUI. Email is SMTP and IMAP, use any number of clients to access your email.

ryantgtg• 2 months ago

- Clicking an iPhone notification opens the app, but never brings me to the actual email

I've been using fastmail on iOS for years and have never experienced this issue. Clicking from a notification opens up the email. Maybe there's a setting you can adjust?

PennRobotics2• 2 months ago

Fastmail had a UI change a year ago, where they went all "rounded corner" and created unique rows for every message that weren't so easily sorted with Stylus CSS. I emailed them about the changes, and a few weeks later the messages were listed in a way that I could easily apply my own stylesheet again. They also acknowledged on their subreddit the UI change was not incredibly popular (even the CEO was "not enjoying" it) and they took some feedback and provided a few better UX customizations in the options.

At one point, Fastmail had an error parsing Unicode in misconfigured iCal files (Google Calendar showed events correctly) but after a short back-and-forth, they fixed it within a week.

Now, Google Calendar has had a problem with my organization's iCal files for the past four weeks. Submitting a bug report via the help community is very opaque and unhelpful (a la "Have you tried turning if off and on again?"). Fastmail loads the iCal correctly. I have no clue if Google is aware or when they'll ever fix it.

One huge productivity advantage to FM over Gmail? Sort by sender name. (This makes it so easy to bulk apply changes)

Setting up own domain has been straightforward. (It's a bit of work ensuring DNS records have DMARC/DKIM/SPF, but it's all in the FM checklist/documentation.) Setting up Python scripts to auto email me using app passwords has been straightforward. Creating aliases and throwaways is straightforward.

I have not regretted paying for email; specifically, Fastmail.

Slow_Hand5• 2 months ago

Does it automatically filter my email into tabs for primary, promotions, social, and updates? Cause that is the single most useful feature offered by Gmail that I have yet to find elsewhere.

I'm not talking about manually tagging, setting up, and filtering all incoming email before my inbox can self-organize. I mean automatically. Only show me the true primary items in my inbox from the jump. Everything else can wait.

In the absence of this feature my inbox becomes a torrent of incoming mail that is far harder to manage and prioritize. I keep my inbox at "zero" and I can completely understand why other people give up and let their inbox be overrun. This feature is essential for me.

loloquwowndueo2• 2 months ago

Mash that unsubscribe button my dude.

cadamsdotcom8• 2 months ago

No it doesn’t.

But luckily you’re about 5 email filter rules away from your ideal setup.

EchoReflection2• 2 months ago

yes. Fastmail can "automatically" do that, if you configure it to have those rules.

AdieuToLogic3• 2 months ago

Does it automatically filter my email into tabs for primary, promotions, social, and updates?

This is where email MUAs[0] shine. Mail user agents such as Thunderbird[1], KMail[2], Apple Mail[3], and nmh[4] (for hard-core Unix command-line aficionados) support filtering and automatic categorization to varying degrees.

All while being mail service agnostic.

0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Email_client

1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Thunderbird

2 - https://apps.kde.org/kmail2/

3 - https://support.apple.com/mail

4 - https://www.nongnu.org/nmh/

andrewflnr2• 2 months ago

One of the handy things that Fastmail (among other providers) lets you do is set up a wildcard email address, so literallyanything@mydomain goes to a specific folder. Any time I want to sign up for some service I don't trust, I'll give them a specific email address. Long-standing practice, blah blah. Also, as my sibling said, "mash that unsubscribe button".

Less practically, it is pretty obnoxious for you to act superior about inbox 0, while pretending not to judge people who "let their inbox be overrun", and at the same time refuse to accept any solution to your inbox that isn't fully automatic. There are lots of options available to you besides leaning entirely on Google's machines of loving grace watching over your inbox.

ipaddr• 2 months ago

Interesting to see people have such strong faith in Google's ability to filter. My experience is email from addresses marked safe ends up in the spam category. Wish you luck.

not2b• 2 months ago

I had to turn off that gmail feature, because to enable it you also have to enable the horrible AI stuff. So gmail is less useful to me now than it used to be. You can't have the good features (automatic categorization, reminders of plane flights) without the intrusive son-of-Clippy crap I can't stand.

boomlinde• 2 months ago

Setting up your own filtering rules seems like a relatively tiny time investment compared to the productivity gains if you have a busy mail account. Other features that Gmail lack are IMO more important than magic filtering, like a proper threaded view, or not being pestered by their AI bullshit.

gosub100• 2 months ago

What's clever about the "promotions" tab being automatic is that it actually makes me want to read them on my own time. Before Gmail my old pattern was classify with read/delete/save. Commercial emails were usually deleted.

watwut2• 2 months ago

Does it automatically filter my email into tabs for primary, promotions, social, and updates? Cause that is the single most useful feature offered by Gmail that I have yet to find elsewhere.

Surprising. I turned that off cause I found that to be yet another google nonsense. It did not filtered well and I simply hit unsubsribe for stuff I dont want.

bpbp-mango• 2 months ago

it doesn't. I've been using fastmail for years and miss this, a lot.

nvarsj• 2 months ago

This is the one great feature about Gmail I think.

But I haven’t touched Gmail in years, been on fastmail for about 6 years now.

I’ve solved this by using the fastmail-mcp plugin and have a skill that organises all my mails for me and highlights high priority ones. Works great - I run it every few days, takes about 5-10 minutes.

csomar• 2 months ago

I guess everyone is different? That's one thing I hate about Gmail. I use Fastmail and funnel emails to different folders. I treat spam as a fact of life.

EchoReflection2• 2 months ago

Fastmail is great. I also use (and really like) Fairemail https://email.faircode.eu/

GoblinSlayer13• 2 months ago

Small (<30 MB)

The joy of modern apps...

rc_mob• 2 months ago

I been using proton but the UI is just a little bit of a let down. missing things that just were natural on gmail and i never had to think about

dunno ok maybe I'll try fastmail

cadamsdotcom8• 2 months ago

Agreed. Proton is not up to my personal standard.

That’s ok - they have a wonderful VPN service that I use every day.

tren• 2 months ago

I agree, it's one of my best value subscriptions. It's especially good if you host a lot of domains, you can link 100 custom domains to a single Fastmail account.

jbaber• 2 months ago

Fastmail is fast enough and has rich enough keyboard shortcuts that I stopped using mutt for it. It's very good.

tuananh2• 2 months ago

my only problem with fastmail is their spam filtering is so bad. they mistake legit emails quite often

thaumasiotes• 2 months ago

That's not exactly a reason to stick with gmail. Gmail will mark anything as spam.

nexus75562• 2 months ago

I agree. Their spam filtering is absolute trash. I get 3-4 spam messages a day in my inbox. I file support tickets for it and they always tell me there is nothing they can do.

distances3• 2 months ago

I disagree. Their spam filtering has been top notch for me. Sometimes spam does get through, but marking that as spam has made sure the next ones of the same are flagged correctly.

Lately LLM generated spam has fooled it more often, though. Let's see if that becomes a problem.

sph3• 2 months ago

It's not. I wrote about this a couple times. Here's how it works: the personal spam filter kicks in after having trained on ~100-200 spam emails. You need to mark them as spam (you might want to use a filter initially if they all have a common pattern) and delete them regularly from the spam folder. Spam training kicks in only when you a spam message is deleted (to avoid training on false positives)

I went through the same phase when I first moved to Fastmail, and this is what customer support explained after some back-and-forth. I don't have spam in my Inbox any more (despite receiving ~20 spam emails per day)

zaptheimpaler2• 2 months ago

Yes literally it threw an invoice from AWS into spam recently. Regularly throws financial docs into spam. Like you, i have a problem with false positives not false negatives.

I brought it up with support once and the domain was failing DMARC. Headers from the AWS email that has a spam score of 9.1! I don’t know much about email but something must be wrong there on Fastmails side.

x-sieve: CMU Sieve 3.0

X-Spam-known-sender: no

X-Spam-sender-reputation: 500 (none)

X-Spam-score: 9.1

X-Spam-hits: DCC_CHECK 1.1, HEADER_FROM_DIFFERENT_DOMAINS 0.249, HTML_MESSAGE 0.001, ME_SENDERREP_NEUTRAL 0.001, MIME_HTML_ONLY 0.1, MPART_ALT_DIFF 0.724, RCVD_IN_DNSWL_NONE -0.0001, RCVD_IN_MSPIKE_H4 0.001, RCVD_IN_MSPIKE_WL 0.001, SPF_HELO_NONE 0.001, SPF_PASS -0.001, T_REMOTE_IMAGE 0.01, URIBL_DBL_ABUSE_PHISH 7, LANGUAGES en, BAYES_USED none, SA_VERSION 4.0.1

X-Spam-source: IP='54.240.9.110', Host='a9-110.smtp-out.amazonses.com', Country='US', FromHeader='com', MailFrom='com'

X-Spam-charsets: subject='UTF-8', html='UTF-8'

wookmaster• 2 months ago

Plus one for Fastmail I’ve been using with a custom domain for years now and it’s great. I don’t use Google for anything at this point, though I’m sure they’re still tracking me somehow.

alex1138• 2 months ago

Actually occasionally fastmail initially loading seems to hold up for a while for me for some reason

40four4• 2 months ago

The author literally mentioned they are in the process of migrating to Fastmail, but it sounds like you’re bringing it up as a new recommendation? Then you restated the reason they are moving away (overbearing AI features in your face) as if it wasn’t the crux of their argument? Then you touted how good Fastmail migration features are after the author stated they actually like the fact they are starting with a clean slate, and are undecided if they even want to migrate? Something smells fishy here my friend

bluehex• 2 months ago

Didn't you consider that the comment you're replying to was for the benefit of other readers not necessarily the OP? I found it useful and yes I did read both.

jesterson• 2 months ago

While GMail is horrible, FastMail is not great either. Their spam filtering is a joke - it was quite a decent on until they ruined it few years ago with some changes.

I have no alternatives to suggest besides doing your own email. It's way better than anything commercial, works the way you want it, and most importantly nowadays, it's not used to train a commercial AI.

wodenokoto2• 2 months ago

I was quite surprised how much better search and spam filters are on fastmail. Both things I did not believe a small company could do better than Google, but I think they did.

I also find the interface better. I was also expecting Google to have resources for optimizing details, that a small company wouldn't get around to.

Fastmail also lets you e-mail a real person for help and they usually take it very seriously - e.g, they go look at logs before following up.

nexus75562• 2 months ago

Are you kidding me about the spam? I have 3-4 spam emails land in my inbox every day on Fastmail. It's horrendous.

damethos• 2 months ago

I am not a Fastmail user but I completely doubt this. I have been using Gmail for 20 years and I have never seen a spam mail land in my inbox which has always impressed me. Everything else I have used from time to time does miss a few, which I guess it might be acceptable if you want to move to another host.

pixelesque2• 2 months ago

I personally find Fastmail's spam handling a lot worse than GMail's: and I get a lot more spam in my GMail address, due to it being a 22 year old address, which I still use for initial sign-ups, before then changing account emails to my fastmail one after a few months.

Very likely a lot of the difference is the types of email each address is getting.

satyamkapoor• 2 months ago

Don’t try Fastmail’s family plan. It’s undercooked. Rest is all greatz

monegator• 2 months ago

If only it was based in europe. Every few weeks i look into detaching from gmail and wonder if proton is the way to go

alecco• 2 months ago

Proton's being a bit slow and weird is totally worth it just for the privacy features. And it's slowly improving with time.

wiether• 2 months ago

I can suggest having a look at Infomaniak: https://www.infomaniak.com/en/ksuite/service-mail

And with the kSuite, you have everything: file storage, chat, emails...

I have no involvement with the company, except as a happy customer for many years

sebastiennight3• 2 months ago

Well you can try Proton for free and see for yourself.

I've noticed that people either care about email being efficient and private, or they care about the comfortable bells and whistles of their existing inbox (and Gmail has many), but you can't really tell which one you are until you test something new for yourself.

bfkwlfkjf• 2 months ago

I'm happy with tutanota.

It's extremely minimal though. I think it's just mail, contacts and calendar.

codecutter• 2 months ago

I did comparison of Fastmail, Protonmail and Mailfence. Finally, I decided to go ahead with Mailfence due to their end-to-end encryption and stronger privacy focus. I am very happy with Mailfence so far.

warumdarum• 2 months ago

Its eating AI pilled companies lunch o clock

natnatenathan• 2 months ago

I just have to add on about how great Fastmail is. They are completely focused on having a stable product, that is relatively simple and cheap. They are not ambitious as a company at all, in the best possible way. They haven't tried to build an office suite. They don't upsell me on any new features. They just deliver a solid, basic product that has been consistently good for more than a decade now. I wish more software and services were like this, I'm tired of everyone hiring an MBA and following the exact same "maximization" business model.

bunnie• 2 months ago

Just another +1 for fastmail, long time user, really pleased with the service. They do one thing and they do it well, and they charge a fair price for the value delivered.

vishnugupta• 2 months ago

+1 to Fastmail. Been their happy customer for 5+ years.

teekert7• 2 months ago

I've been very happy with Protonmail, you can even use your old Gmail address from within Protonmail [0]. Although arguable doing that is counter productive, you want receive gmails but reply with you new address -> Yes this is the time to buy a domain and own an address for the rest of your life, so you can move again with little pain in the future ;)

[0] https://proton.me/blog/proton-mail-connect-gmail

microtonal2• 2 months ago

I temporarily moved from Fastmail to Proton Mail, but found several downsides:

* Loading mails (especially when going quickly through them) has quite some latency. Possibly due to decrypting.

* Search is pretty bad compared to Fastmail.

* The keyboard shortcuts seem to never work correctly.

So I went back to Fastmail for mail (we still use Proton Drive, which has its own set of warts).

dotancohen7• 2 months ago

  > Yes this is the time to buy a domain and own an address for the rest of your life

As someone who does use their own domain to receive mail, I am acutely aware of how diligent I must be to never lose that domain. The chances of someone acquiring access to my Gmail account are far lower than me losing the dotancohen.com domain, especially with the cyber attacks against Israeli assets that have been ongoing incessantly since 2023. One's email is often the gateway to every other online service, via reset password features - losing access is problematic and an attacker getting access is nigh unrecoverable.

BatteryMountain2• 2 months ago

My problem with protonmail (and telegram) is that in my country, only scammers use those two services. So when I encounter these, I immediately distrust the person I'm interacting with and assume the worst. Even my one neighbor uses it and I distrust him immensely as he is not tech savvy yet he uses proton... its strange. How does he even know about it? He and his wife are not forth coming about what they do for a living, they seem to be nice people, but they both use proton. In our country its a huge red flag.

a965• 2 months ago

My notes say: No IMAP or other way to export emails, they're trapped in the service. CEO is a Trump supporter.

ternaryoperator• 2 months ago

One additional benefit of Fastmail is fast, helpful tech support. The few times i’ve needed them, they’ve answered quickly and given me what i needed in the first response.

behringer• 2 months ago

Google doesn't have app passwords anymore so plus one for fastmail.

cadamsdotcom8• 2 months ago

It still does, but the page is hidden and nothing in the UI links to it.

If you still need it, you can find the url by looking at blog guides to setting up calendar integrations.

dotancohen7• 2 months ago

  > Looking for your alternative? Let me give you some (non financially motivated) praise for Fastmail.

In TFA the author specifically mentions triaging Fastmail. He is happy with it.

raxxorraxor2• 2 months ago

I have no idea why people don't just use a standard imap mail client, Thunderbird being the most obvious choice here.

cadamsdotcom8• 2 months ago

Breaks my heart to see you stuck in your unenlightenment.

If only there was some way to learn the answer to questions.

lloeki• 2 months ago

As a Fastmail user, every time I have to use Gmail for work I'm aggravated by the absolute stupid UX of it which seems to have been thoroughly ruined around the Material Design era; it also seems to be unable to handle basic operations such as mass mark read or delete, or search.

Fastmail handles the same things with aplomb and has much better screen real estate usage, for one.

The only thing I kind of want with Fastmail is if it had some EU-based datacenter.

jorisw4• 2 months ago

I went with Fastmail just because it's not hosted in the US (they're in Australia)

ymolodtsov3• 2 months ago

What issues do you see? I've never had issue with any mass operation there.

iknowstuff2• 2 months ago

Fastmail seems good but there’s some comfort from tutanota/protonmail promising to store my emails e2e encrypted (though they obviously can read them on send/receive). Have you tried them? What was your opinion?

account425• 2 months ago

Whatever provider you switch to, do use the opportunity to get your own domain so that you won't be locked in in the future.

f4stjack• 2 months ago

Just a small note about fastmail: Do not launch a trial with your planned username. Because I have opened up a trial account, it expired and when I decided to reactivate it (with payment in mind) I find myself unable to sign in. I cannot reset my password as it says "Sorry, we canʼt find an account with that username." and it does not let me log in.

Then again I also moved from gmail to mailbox.org and am a happy camper since. I don't know if we are a majority but I find myself cutting all ties with google services (youtube premium, drive, gemini etc.) as they try to force unwanted features and workflows in my daily life.

meixger• 2 months ago

Ditto: I've also lost my Proton username because my trial account has expired.

tiimbz2• 2 months ago

I had the same issue, but after contacting support, I was able to re-claim the email address from my trial account and use it as an email alias of my main Fastmail account.

ssivark• 2 months ago

I was curious about whether one could layer email-ids as an interface on top of ATProto, and get all the decentralization benefits of the latter while being easy to move on from the former. A bit of searching threw up Comail [1]. Curious to hear perspectives on Comail / the general idea.

[1] https://comail.at

leokennis• 2 months ago

+1 for Fastmail.

I migrated from Gmail a few years ago. Setting up your own domain is peanuts. Migrating all your mail from Gmail is literally just clicking some buttons in the UI and then it all happens in the background. The interface is fast, robust, and can be configured to have pleasant early '00s levels of contrast.

amarant• 2 months ago

How good are their spam filters? That's what keeps me coming back to Gmail every time I try something different.

cadamsdotcom8• 2 months ago

You’re in for a treat. They’re good!

GJim2• 2 months ago

“try our new AI features!” which never remembers that you dismissed it 50 times in a row.

Ah, the standard Silicon Valley permission request format:

"Would you like us to invade your privacy: 'Yes' Or 'Ask me again later'".

It's like being propositioned by a nutcase who won't take no for an answer.... the ethics and legality of which are obvious for all to see.

nopurpose2• 2 months ago

How is offline support in their mobile app? I am looking for a protonmail alternative, because it didn't open emails when I really needed while being offline.

cadamsdotcom8• 2 months ago

It’s good! Works for me when I need it, but you should still save crucial stuff somewhere locally.

Also, I recommend to disable ios Files’ setting to auto-delete at will “because it’s in the cloud!”

c16• 2 months ago

A big +1 for fastmail, but their official ios app is 0/10 the last time I used it. Not a big problem if you use mail.app or their website on desktop.

Something I've done and which has been a big quality of life improvement is to set up a folder with 30 day retention, then an email rule to move any emails with `+` or apple relay there. Those are legitimate emails I want to read such as online order status, but I don't need them in my every day email.

josephg• 2 months ago

Their ios app works ok for me. But I really wish it was fully native, and not just a webview wrapper of their webmail client. They have truly excellent IMAP support though (and JMAP too). So yeah, mail.app works great.

They also support apple's custom XAPPLEPUSH IMAP extension, which means fastmail supports mobile push over IMAP. I think they're the only ones who support it other than apple.

abc123abc1232• 2 months ago

I use infomaniak. Works great, no complaints. The support is based on human beings as well. I like that, and they are polite and helpful too!

egorfine2• 2 months ago

Moved to Fastmail from Gmail like 15 years ago and I couldn't be happier.

thibaut_barrere2• 2 months ago

I started migrating to FastMail years ago, but never got to switch in full yet, because in my case with a public email address, the level of unhandled spam is too high.

Did you meet that issue?

cadamsdotcom8• 2 months ago

Nope. The spam filtering works fantastically for me. They might’ve improved it - I migrated only a few months ago. So it could be worth another try.

threecoins• 2 months ago

Fastmail is great, their android app is also great except one single thing. They for some obsure reason insist on opening attachments like pdfs inside the app instead of in the default app. But the problem is that they don't support opening password protected pdfs. And they shows an error that they dont support password protected files without providing an option to open in default app. I have to manually click on the file, read the stupid error, click the download button(this is available only in the error page), then use the notification bar to open the damn file on my phone. Everything else is fine. This one sketchy insistance to open every file themselves within the app even if they dont know how to do that is something that annoys me.

redbell• 2 months ago

Speaking about Gmail->FastMail migration, you might be interested in this ten-years old thread: Moving 12 years of email from GMail to FastMail ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12247401)

internet_points• 2 months ago

Another happy Fastmail user here. They have great IMAP support (with app password) so I have a full local copy on my laptop that I can search instantly with notmuch or read/write from Emacs, but lately I've also started using their web UI a lot because it's just so fast and simple and well-thought-out. When they ship new features, it's stuff that makes you think "oh, that's actually a good idea – and they even made a very logical keyboard shortcut for it". And they've been very responsive to the few support requests I've made.

eth0up• 2 months ago

Serious question (for me): How would you rate fastmail strictly in terms of perseverence over time, ie will it still be here a decade from now? Confidence in that alone would move me there.

nmjenkins2• 2 months ago

Fastmail’s been around since 1999. (That’s 5 years older than Gmail…). It’s profitable and employee owned, not VC funded.

The senior staff have all been working on it for over 15 years. Anything can happen of course, but you’ll be hard pressed to find a tech company with more apparent longevity.

(Source: I am one of those senior staff)

thenakulchawla• 2 months ago

Fastmail is indeed great. It’s been a pleasure to use.

You can add multiple domains to your account without making it a feel like an enterprise.

All the features relating to the aliases is available on the ios app. One doesn’t need to jump between the web and the app to do basic things.

Twirrim• 2 months ago

I'm not sure if it's still there, but for a long time Gmail offered a lightweight, simple HTML version of their site. Essentially the original UI for it.

It was astounding just how quick it was, which really shows you how little of a damn they seem to give about their users. That's especially weird, given that they dogfood their own products.

prepend3• 2 months ago

Thanks for your note. I’ve wanted to get off gmail for years and your description answered many nagging questions I had been too lazy to look up.

I switched my domain over to fastmail and have been using it for the past hour and seems promising. The interaction with the company is nice too and they seem very much “do one thing well” and doesn’t make me feel scummy like every time I interact with google’s products.

Interestingly I didn’t realize how slow gmail was until switching. Not just the web ui. I use the ios mail app and gmail didn’t support push, only fetch. And the app is 17.8MB (compared to gmail’s 716.7MB). Crazy that it’s 40x smaller.

ieee2• 2 months ago

I would rather invest 10 x 60 Eur = 600 Eur every 10 years into new laptop or bigger RAM rather then trying to switch to non-free email and lose whole Google ecosystem.

Not having much spam is number one priority for me. 50ms delay in refresh rate is OK. In fact I have never noticed and it have never came to my mind that Gmail is slow. Yes, it needs RAM but I was never annoyed by any "slowness".

stavros2• 2 months ago

Fastmail is the best and you cannot change my mind ever. I love it.

prismlfx• 2 months ago

thanks for the suggestion.. gmail has really been a dog lately so this sounds worth looking at

gs173• 2 months ago

It's really bizarre at this point. I'm okay with things like having one-click options for simple replies like "That time works for me" (Google Messages on Android is hilariously bad at these but it's at least useful occasionally). I'm not okay with it suggesting a whole point-by-point response to someone else.

Today I had an email from a colleague where it had a suggested reply so large it didn't fit in the preview box. The response was the usual LLM "sounds good but doesn't say anything" prose. It's not just unhelpful — it's a waste of everyone's time!

ToucanLoucan• 2 months ago

Are we shocked, really? We have evidence from discovery of them actively making search results worse to pad query volume. Of course they’re using enabled-by-default, run-without-asking AI features to pad Gemini usage.

The Valley is tripping over themselves to convince the world fancy autocomplete is worth 800 billion.

jerf• 2 months ago

The economic tension of these "run by default" AIs is quite hilarious once you see it.

On the one hand, the relevant KPIs of whoever is driving this product needs to be able to show AI usage is increasing, because AI usage is obviously the Platonic embodiment of goodness [1].

On the other hand, these things are expensive, so while it's mandatory that Google searches stuff these things in our faces, they are also horribly underprovisioned. If my only exposure to AI was the various search engine popups or the other free AIs, or even the bullet-point AIs that I'm nominally paying for but not really, like in Office, I would also have a pretty negative view of AI. I use DuckDuckGo more than Google but whatever model they may nominally be using to power their search result summarizer, it is de facto at least two years behind the state of the art in a very fast moving industry. It frequently gets things exactly backwards and is clearly leaning on its internal model a lot more than the links it has supposedly read, and clearly has a thinking budget of "indistinguishable from zero", and I don't know what kind of summarized web page content is being fed to it but it must be getting brutally dismembered in whatever summary is being fed to the AI.

The debate about how useful AI you pay for may rage on, but at least at this point in 2026, I'd say the AI you can get for free is every bad thing anyone says it is.

[1]: I believe there is a lot of useful things current AI can do, but there is no level of quality AI can ever reach in which AI usage for the sake of using AI will ever be a terminal good. Honestly any manager, whether they be a line manager or a CEO of a multinational company, that has ever pushed that in any capacity, should be fired for demonstrating gross incompetence for that position. It's "second or third week of Econ 101" or so that you learn about why it's never a good idea to just open the checkbook and spend an unbounded amount of money on something, and nothing you'll learn further down the line will ever contradict that.

busymom0• 2 months ago

it's a waste of everyone's time!

Plus it's a huge waste of natural resources for the energy usage!

al_borland6• 2 months ago

One could argue the “That time works for me” prompts are also a waste of time, especially when only occasionally useful. Do we really need a button to type 5 words on an occasional basis?

I’ve used the button before, but I think my life would be exactly the same without it.

gs173• 2 months ago

I have to wonder if they just give us the illusion of being useful.

Just had an email asking if I could meet "tomorrow at 5:00 PM, or would 6:30 work better?". The suggestions were "I will be there at 6", "Tonight works" or "Either time works", only one of which is even valid! Maybe for every time it saves me a few seconds, there's at least one where I have to read them all and realize none fit before writing what I would have done without the quick replies.

swyx2• 2 months ago

then you dont deal in high enough email volume

iknowstuff2• 2 months ago

It’s not bizarre once you realize it raised some team’s engagement metrics (like # of emails sent) by 2%, a result they were unable to achieve otherwise, so they shipped it and celebrated a win

A_Venom_Roll• 2 months ago

I see what you did there :)

phyzome2• 2 months ago

I can heartily recommend going into your Google settings and disabling the global "smart features" option. It removes a huge amount of crap all at once.

For GMail, go to Settings -> General (https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/#settings/general) and scroll down to "Smart features" and disable that.

Then go to the next option, "Google Workspace smart features" and disable them across your entire workspace with 1 or 2 more toggles.

Finally, just switch to Fastmail or something. :-)

pickleRick2433• 2 months ago

I found the blog post a bit annoying because it was clearly trying to win internet points rather than actually solve a problem. What you wrote above would have resolved the issue in a couple of minutes, faster than moving over to another email provider. I found all the Gemini integration into consumer products super annoying as well and disabled/unpinned all of it months ago the day I noticed it and thought "wth is this annoying thing". Now, if/when Google removes the option to disable, this blog post would be much more impactful IMO.

eschatology• 2 months ago

Did you read it?

The author addressed this; they were unable to disable it completely.

sourcecodeplz• 2 months ago

The author did say he tried some settings but not everything was available to disable. I dove deeper into it here [0]. You can disable Gemini AI and others and there is also a "nuclear option" where you disable all smart features.

[0] https://favs.eu.org/disable-gmail-ai/

TonyAlicea10• 2 months ago

Gmail’s summaries are both intrusive and poor quality. They actively make the email experience worse.

This is all a solution looking for a problem, pretending that people don’t have time to read or write their own email.

With both Google search and email Google is willing to replace reality with uncertain pseudo-reality. I find it extraordinary.

Havoc• 2 months ago

Similar experience. Google products in general are becoming really tedious.

It feels almost like these companies have too many devs just cramming in features to justify their existence & year end performance review, rather than considering whether it is an actual improvement to the user's use case.

Gmail is also starting to really get on my nerves with their enshitified UI. Every button looks different (presumably each "owned" by someone else). It's full of popup overlays you need to click away to get to the interface. On iphone 1/3rd of my inbox real estate is currently a banner about data sharing controls?

I just want to write emails guys...

dspillett5• 2 months ago

It looks like you are writing an email. Would you like some help with that?

Seems somewhat familiar from somewhere…

I got a new Samsung phone a few months ago (my last phone was showing signs of dying soon, and I'd promised to never touch Xiaomi again). It took a while to convince the two competing sets of GenAI features (Gemini and Bixby, and related features) that if I wanted their help I'd come calling, and until then they should sod off and leave me to do things myself.

Tor311• 2 months ago

That starts to sound like "It's a nice email you have there.. too bad if something should happen to it.."

elija• 2 months ago

Instead of promoting LLMs to write emails and then using LLMs to summarize emails, we could just write succinctly to each other.

ern• 2 months ago

Something I hate about ChatGPT is that it assumes I want my text to be rewritten instead of engaging with the content.

I like my writing style. Sure it may leave some sort of linguistic fingerprint and it may not meet some LLM’s idea of what “good” looks like, but I don’t care.

What’s worrying is that the rewrite-by-default behavior is probably there because most users want it.

distances3• 2 months ago

I can't allow LLMs write my messages in any language I'm fluent in. They just don't sound like me at all. It would feel dirty and dishonest to send that slop out.

They can be good at grammar checks, but even then I wouldn't fix quite everything, it's better to let some of my natural flaws go through.

Tor311• 2 months ago

My wife translated some text she had written in her own language to my native language, as she didn't feel she could do it. I found grammar errors, surprising ones. I found places where pronouns were used so far into the sentence that a reader would be lost finding what that pronoun actually referred to. And more. In the end I rewrote the LLM-generated text myself, many pages of it.

topaz0• 2 months ago

Individuality is not to be tolerated.

cutler• 2 months ago

Proton Mail is excellent as is their password manager and VPN.

grishka• 2 months ago

So weird to me to realize that for some people, email providers have a UX, and enough of it that they could consider switching.

I've been using email through a client for decades. My primary email is Gmail, but I have no idea what Gmail is like on the web these days. Save for providers like hey.com, whose entire selling point is their unique web UX, I never understood why would someone use email in their web browser.

julienbourdeau• 2 months ago

The flow with hey.com so much better that being an app or in browser is irrelevant. It's 100x better than anything else I ever used.

vizzah• 2 months ago

use IMAP and your fav. e-mail client. Gmail's UI has sucked for ages. Totally unusable for pro users.

abhaynayar• 2 months ago

I mean I always knew Google could read all my files, but seeing it give an AI summary for every single freaking (PDF) file I open on my Drive is insane. Last I checked couldn't turn it off. It's insane. When I get some free time, I'm probably moving on to Protonmail or something. I'm always a defaults kinda guy, I don't care much bout privacy and such (I'd rather live frictionless) but this garbage useless AI bullshit is getting on my nerves. I don't need you to summarize all my private and sensitive documents. I know how to read.

effnorwood• 2 months ago

now you have clojure. good.

tambourine_man• 2 months ago

I only ever use Gmail's backend. I've been using it for years with Mail.app on both Mac and iOS. Every time I load the web interface I'm appalled.

Not that Mail.app is amazing. It sometimes corrupts its sqlite db (I have 300k+ emails dating back to the late 90s). But it's still way better than the dreadful web interface that only seems to get worse and slower.

NordStreamYacht• 2 months ago

Why not just use Gmail via imap and a email client of your choice?

ddxv3• 2 months ago

I've been on the very cheap Zoho mail for awhile and it's done everything I want it to do including meetings.

ddxv3• 2 months ago

Just to say, Zoho is great as it has meetings / calendar etc which I need for things. I also just, today, tried purelymail and was also pretty awesome. $10 a year, I think multiple domains and users. Really nice.

alfirous• 2 months ago

I considered Zoho in the past, but to bloated with feature I don't need, IMO ity more suited for business and enterprise like Goofle Workspace.

Now I settled on Purelymail for the time being. It's simple and purely just email (pun intended).

citizenpaul• 2 months ago

I moved to fastmail about 2 years ago. It was not a super painful process, they make it easy as possible. Also I used it as an opportunity to "reverse-whitelist" all my accounts by giving everything i use its own disposable masked address.

spam is now nonexistent in my email.

xyst• 2 months ago

Gmail doesn’t think author is "stupid." It’s Google’s business model to sell your data as a product to advertisers; or use it to train models.

Guestmodinfo• 2 months ago

Is Fast Mail having human support? Suppose I forget my password or suppose fastmail somehow bans my account then is there a readily available human on the other end whom I can message or talk to. Recently on HN someone posted about a school which lost its 10 years of Google apps data and account with no possible recourse.

sedatk• 2 months ago

Yes: support@fastmail.com

anonymousiam• 2 months ago

I haven't seen this new annoying AI behavior because I use IMAP to access my GMail. After reading this post, I decided to backup my GMail inbox, which is something I've never bothered to do because it's mostly a secondary backup that I rarely use.

So it took a few minutes to finish copying all of the ~1,500 messages or so, and then I went to verify that I got them all. For some odd reason, GMail doesn't let me copy (at least via IMAP) any messages after 1/17/2024. It had no trouble copying everything older than that, dating back to May of 2009. I tried copying just a single message (from last week) and it silently fails every time. I can view the message via IMAP, but I cannot copy it.

Has anybody else seen this?

Update: It seems to be an issue with my mail server because I was able to copy the remaining 205 messages into a local folder.

ttctciyf• 2 months ago

Personally, as a gmail user of about 2 decades, this is the first I've heard of this particular issue, probably because for some years I don't even read past the word "smart" before disabling whatever feature du jour is being pushed in my face.

I'm just now migrating away from gmail for a different kind of inanity[1] all the same.

1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48367950

smukherjee19• 2 months ago

That's weird. I use Gmail regularly and did not experience anything like that; it works just the way it did for the past 10+ years. And auto categorization still works just fine, and no AI summarizing my email or trying to write my drafts. I wonder what difference we have in settings.

Also, not to be disrespectful to the OP, but seems quite an... overblown reaction. To each their own, though.

Tor311• 2 months ago

This seems to be caused by "smart features" enabled in settings, and can be turned off. When they were introduced they popped up in gmail and you could choose to accept or reject, I of course rejected all of them (nothing good could possibly come from accepting), so I've never had any of the issues mentioned in the blog post.

agenticmfw• 2 months ago

I disagree that the AI prompts are a bad design. But I won’t defend Gmail either. I’ve been using HEY mail for a year now and I really like it. No AI features yet!

nisiddharth• 2 months ago

I want to do the same, but how does one migrate to a different E-mail provider? The current email address is in use in uncountable places, how will all of that change?

lucasayb97• 2 months ago

Speaking for myself who recently made this change, it can take some time and be a bit complicated, but any decent mail provider that you choose can receive messages from external providers. In my case, I use Fastmail with a custom domain and receive messages from my Gmail account as well.

Just keep in mind that you don't need to change every single account at once. You just need to change the ones that you use the most, and with time you can change the others that you remember.

virgoerns• 2 months ago

1. Buy a domain and bind it to your email so this situation never happens again in the future. 2. Automatically forward all new emails to the new provider (gmail has an option for that somewhere). 3. Gradually change your email in all services and inform peopke about address change. 4. Use your old gmail as spam box.

ponsfrilus• 2 months ago

So everyone is using the web UI? I'm still using a mail client (Thunderbird) connecting to my mail accounts through the Internet Message Access Protocol (IMAP). Today I feel old.

replwoacause• 2 months ago

Also here to say I've been a happy Fastmail user for like 7 years after moving away from gmail (or Google Business or whatever they used to call it) and it's been AWESOME.

40four4• 2 months ago

Oh man, I left Gmail 6-7 years ago for different reasons (a total overhaul & hardening of my personal privacy/ security posture), but kudos to you! Get away and don’t look back, you won’t regret it! I’d recommend de-googling your life of all their services, you really don’t need them. There are good, more privacy respecting options for just about everything except maps. Google Maps is the one service I still use constantly.

distances3• 2 months ago

There are very good map alternatives, like Organic Maps and HERE WeGo. But Google's place data is such a good moat that I'm also still using it.

40four4• 2 months ago

Yeah I don’t use it for navigation, but for exploring your local area, finding restaurants, retail or other businesses it’s hard to ignore unfortunately

ramon156• 2 months ago

I wish it was the same for e.g. SEO.

Meta and Google ads are kind of a must. It's the only service I cannot replace.

But for everyday humans, Google and Meta are the dark clouds in the sky you can just ignore, you do not need to stand in the rain. No one's making you.

40four4• 2 months ago

Yeah that makes sense, I didn’t consider advertising

baby• 2 months ago

What annoys me the most is that I can’t efficiently track my emails with the default. It’s unusable imo if you have a lot of emails. What I ended up doing was to disable read on preview, and enable shortcuts, so you can navigate with vim shorcuts and have to manually mark emails as read.

whiplash451• 2 months ago

Gmail has become unbearably slow over the past year.

What used to be instantaneous (like, opening an email) now takes seconds.

Google, what happened to you?

dajonker• 2 months ago

Some of these features can be turned off. Others can’t. Or if they can, it means also turning off useful long-standing features like automatic thread categorization.

This, I absolutely hate it. And like the author said, it must be intentional, so that someone at Google can show the usage numbers and get a promotion.

goobatrooba• 2 months ago

I've moved to Migadu a few years ago for more or less the same reason, but pre AI - Google's unrequested filtering and sorting made things actively worse on my daily chaos. Moreover the eternal threat of Google cutting the cord for any non-defined infraction and locking you out of your own life is crazy. I still use drive and other Google features, but my email is just an account login and nothing more.

Migadu has been a breeze, very sane and transparent payment model, human support, infinite domains and accounts (!). What I really miss are calendar features which are just underdeveloped, but it seems mostly the Microsoft and Google have ruined that area by doing whatever they want.

I like the instructions Migadu gave for copying your emails over - just open thunderbird and copy or move everything from one account. I put everything in an Archive folder so can find it if ever needed. Just insanely pragmatic and it worked.

zkmon2• 2 months ago

The reason why the tech giants push those features is that they tune their features to serve the average user from where bulk of their revenue comes from. If you feel offended by "Tap to improve", then you are not their average user. Their average user would be thankful for such offer to help. That's their product manager's view.

Even for your own business and product, you would focus on serving the category of user from where bulk of your revenue would come from. And your fringe users would feel they are not cared for. That's what is happening.

nntlol• 2 months ago

I think AI should not have the access to our Gmails its private

leke• 2 months ago

I was forwarding something to my wife and I see this other person suggested in the recipient list. The weird way the suggestion UI is designed makes it look like they are already added, but I assumed I would have to select the person in the second forward box to add them. Anyway, I won't migrate for now though because I hardly use email anymore.

crassus_ed• 2 months ago

Same issue here. I want to migrate away, but rarely use email and I have it setup everywhere which would take quite some effort to pull off.

daesorin• 2 months ago

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urbandw311er2• 2 months ago

Exactly the same problem manifests itself in Google Docs.

Hit RETURN. New paragraph. Begin considering what you will write. Prompt pops up: “Help me write.” Every time.

It’s incredibly distracting and turning it off is hard wired into disabling about 1000 other features.

wildrhythms• 2 months ago

But when you accidentally typed into the prompt field and hit enter it registered a daily active user metric so the feature must be a hit!

articsputnik• 2 months ago

If you want a Superhuman-like interface, that is running in TUI with neovim as a composer and a modern neomutt as a reader, check out neomd [1]. I'm the creator, so I'm biased, but I replaced my previously used HEY email with it. It has a screener and a GTD workflow built in.

Just in case, it works with any SMTP/IMAP setup like Fastmail, or any other. Proton mail works as well but need a little more to setup initially, even gmail (but much slower as the article explains, I noticed that too)

[1] https://neomd.ssp.sh

tzury• 2 months ago

A. Disable the Gemini suggestions if you don’t want it (I did so).

B. If one’s using a free mail service for 16 years, and then came to not liking its recent development, in which world shitting on it in public is the right and necessary thing to do?

C. In which world someone switching mail provider is a top front page news item?

D. If the case in B is not free, then this means the OP was heavier user than my teenage daughter. Thus consumed more of it.

FabHK• 2 months ago

BTW, one more thing where Google thinks I'm stupid:

Increasingly, it tries to tie your phone number to your accounts. Fair enough, problems with fake accounts and all that, I don't like it but I understand it.

However, the prompt is invariably "Let us verify it's you. Please enter your phone number:" or something along those lines. With that, you don't verify that it's me. You just verify that someone has a phone number. It's for your protection, not for my protection. Don't patronise me.

Tor311• 2 months ago

Yes, that's annoying. I have no interest in connecting my phone number to accounts here and there.

Some firms go the other way.. I use the "Line" app for communication, and initially (many years ago) it was connected to your phone, which caused difficulties if you moved countries (among other things).

They have, however, now removed the connection to a phone number. Good.

AgentReinAi• 2 months ago

The 'smart' features are a classic example of designing for the median user while actively degrading the experience for power users. Smart Compose, nudges, category tabs all of them make sense if you get 50 emails a day and respond to 5. They become noise if you have actual workflows. The problem is you can't opt out of the product vision, only individual features.

slavoingilizov• 2 months ago

So many seem to have made a similar move. But the one thing holding me back: starting with a new email address.

My email address is not just for email. It's so firmly embedded in my digital life, it's hard to think how to remove it. It's my identity. I use "login with Google" in most places where it's available. It's my backup recovery for my MFA authenticator. It's my github alias.

So what is the strategy everyone follows to start with a custom domain? Do people use redirection? Is that effective? What happens when an email is redirected from Gmail to my new host, and I want to keep replying without the recipients thinking I've changed email? If you do that, is it even worth switching, given you have to keep your Gmail account?

That is the more interesting part of these stories to me than which host people move to.

jjbinx007• 2 months ago

Same here. What worries me most is what if Google just decide for whatever reason to close my email account down. I've already had several Youtube accounts closed for (in my opinion) spurious reasons. The appeals process is a joke. I can live without Youtube, but I can't easily get myself out of the gmail hole I've dug over the last 2 decades.

b3kart• 2 months ago

you know what they say about planting a tree. buy a domain name, set up a forward from gmail, and set a reminder to migrate 1 account per day to your new email address. 1 year later you’ll be in a much better position in case google decides to randomly ban you

VileSquirrel• 2 months ago

I set up a redirection and tried to change my gmail address with the new one in all the important places I could (took a couple hours; now and then I notice a new one I should change). I also still have my gmail address set up in my mail client so I can answer from gmail if I need to, but that never happened in more than a year. For everyone that actually knows me I gave them the new address when it came up.

moritonal• 2 months ago

Rip the band-aid. You don't own your email, which means all the things you're worried about could at any moment be lost anyway.

Buy a domain, own the MX records, send your emails where-ever you want. Then just try live your life, and anytime you log into something, try swap it over to your new domain.

Keep your gmail, keep it as the backup email. Just reduce your risk.

dd8601fn• 2 months ago

I did this. I just had to resign myself to it being an ongoing process.

I did NOT do forwarding. It was the easiest way to identify what's still associated with the old address.

It was not a clean break. I still have the old account, and occasionally it turns out something is still contacting me at it. That's ok... 99.9% free and clear is better than 0%.

Getting people to stop emailing my old address was annoying. But also, there were fewer people than I thought that still email instead of messaging. Email is mostly account stuff.

I decoupled. When selecting a new service I intentionally did NOT look for, or use, ten services at one provider. Provider stickiness was what makes the process painful to begin with.

Some accounts will not let you change addresses, ever. For those I just bit the bullet and deleted old accounts and made new ones (like ecobee).

The IdP thing wasn't a huge deal, but I don't do a ton of that anyway.

I also moved to a better password manager, and that helped keep track of what I had moved.

I did some takeout process stuff. Aside from the opportunity to clean up and reimport contacts, I don't think I ever used most of it. Most things were just less important than I thought they would be.

Henchman215• 2 months ago

Curious your choice of password manager?

tardedmeme5• 2 months ago

Just make a new one and start using it for new things. Move things over piecemeal. You don't have to close your old account.

epsteingpt2• 2 months ago

Your experience is 100% unrelated.

The PM (I know her) is juicing her results, that's all.

With pressure from her bosses and ultimately the CEO to show 'usage' in AI to raise $80B of capital (debt) to build more datacenter.

Unfortunately, those are the incentives of the system.

P.S. No offense to anyone involved - I wouldn't wish the bureaucracy inside Google to make a product change upon anyone. You've used (or tried) to use their cloud products right?

rsynnott3• 2 months ago

The message you’re sending is that you think I’m not capable of reading and writing my own emails.

Huh, really? The message I take from Google’s AI fetish is that Google is _desperate_ to push this stuff on people so that they can show use and make it look like less of an expensive failure. It’s kind of comical at this point; you can’t use a Google thing without being bombarded with pleading to use Gemini.

ralferoo• 2 months ago

I turned off "smart features" in the setting months ago, and I've never seen any of the things the author complains about.

maratc• 2 months ago

I never go to Gmail web interface, so… same.

tim333• 2 months ago

I have smart features on and use the web interface and am still not seeing the annoying stuff! Maybe I'm not cool enough. Or it's figured I'm not into it.

dostick• 2 months ago

What the suggestion chatbot designers don’t realize is that accepting the suggestion may be a double cognitive load than just writing it. If it’s an email of any importance you have to read and understand the whole suggestion. And to get the suggestion you already expressed that thought.

porknbeans00• 2 months ago

The rush to AI everything has really showcased the epic stupidity of tech leadership.

ndom91• 2 months ago

Long time protonmail subscriber and reasonably happy, but them not allowing SMTP access (other than through proton bridge which is a GUI app - workaround: https://ndo.dev/blog/headless_protonbridge) kind of sucks, and their search functionality is also not great.

Debating moving over to Fastmail as well

olliebrkr• 2 months ago

I agree on the search functionality. Even the apps do feel a little clunkier than Gmail. Considering how much I get for my Proton subscription I doubt I'll look for an alternative for a while. They're mild annoyances really.

egorfine2• 2 months ago

It's the general attitude of multiple companies that I see that makes my blood boil: obviously you are stupid and therefore we will treat you like a toddler.

high_byte• 2 months ago

you vill use ze ai und you vill love it

alok-g• 2 months ago

WhatsApp too is nowadays showing nagging 'predictions' for what I want to type with no way to disable those. I do use AI for a lot of things, but otherwise I do not even use auto-correct, auto-capitalization, auto-anything.

bonheurisop• 2 months ago

it needs phone number

moealmaw• 2 months ago

I feel the same about auto completion in antigravity

sylware• 2 months ago

I left gmail... well, not really, I was kicked out of gmail, because I am a user of noscript/basic HTML browsers and the only way to "revalidate" you account was to use a whatng cartel web engine. I recall the noscript/basic HTML interface of gmail was dropped after a while.

At the time I was paying for DNS. Then, most, if not all, DNS registrars which are not requiring a whatng cartel web engine are now gone.

The email people were careful to design the email system to work without DNS, then I went IPv[46] literals. It is stronger than SPF, since if the SMTP IP does no match the IPs in the envelope and the headers the email will be dropped.

But the "geniuses" at gmail ignore that and say that I don't have a DNS PTR record... how convenient... (My ISP does provide a PTR service... gated behind the requirement of a 'whatng cartel' web engine...).

And I don't forget about "spamhaus", a shady swiss/andoran company, which many email admins have a weird tendency to pay that for their block lists which includes ISP consumer IPs (people do not have the right to have an email server, ofc).

We are going to endup with with compuserve/AOL all over again.

Tor311• 2 months ago

Somewhat off-topic, but also a followup.. I'm worried I'll be "kicked out" of gmail as well, at least on my mobile gmail device.. an Android tablet. I have an old one which doesn't receive Android updates anymore, gmail works perfectly fine in Opera (and Vivaldi). I have a newer Android tablet, I bought it to be ready when the day came that the old one doesn't work for some reason, or an app won't work and can't be updated (due to too old Android - and in fact there are a few of those already).

The problem? The browsers work fine on everything on the new tablet, EXCEPT gmail. Whenever I try gmail, in Opera or Vivaldi (same versions as on the old tablet), I get something along the lines of "the site can't be found". As if wifi was off. (paraphrased, I don't have one in front of me). Been like that forever. It's baffling.

victor22• 2 months ago

Gmail has been pure shit for the past years. I started because it did not have spam, now I get endless spam on a daily basis like they're trying to kick me out on purpose

Tor311• 2 months ago

I don't see any of those (horribly-sounding) AI "helpers" when I read or write messages in gmail. I tried it again just now, to make sure that nothing had changed since yesterday. I do remember clicking through some suggested "feature improvements" a while ago and saying "No" to all of them. Can't really remember what it was though. Can it be that the author has some option enabled in settings somewhere which allows this? Or is this something GMail is (forcibly) gradually rolling out? If so, shudder.

EditUpdate: After reading another comment, this must have been a bunch of "smart features" which gmail suggested a while ago. I just, as I said, refused all of them. So they're available in Settings somewhere. Find, turn off.

upofadown2• 2 months ago

Gmail is one of the shoddiest of the ultra-cheap email providers. If you use Gmail, a significant number of messages will disappear. They don't go to junk, they just disappear. Gmail will reject messages for obscure technical reasons. They recently decided that they would no longer accept messages signed with 1024 bit RSA DKIM. So, with no public announcement they just turned on the restriction. I found out about this from a random Mastodon poster who wasn't really sure what was going on. The error message returned to the sender gave no indication at all.

Gmail is the email provider for people that like to claim they never got the email. Google has somehow made the most reliable messaging medium, unreliable.

It is obvious that Google simply doesn't care about email. So it makes perfect sense for them to use Gmail to promote something that they do care about.

Henchman215• 2 months ago

They care about reading your emails. At this point that is why gmail exists.

theYipster• 2 months ago

I'm amazed at how many folks on this forum see the Web UI as intrinsically tied to the service. As someone else rightly said, e-mail = IMAP + SMTP. That is true of Gmail as well.

Frankly, I've always hated the Gmail web UI, so I never use it. Not in the 22 years I've had a Gmail account.

IMHO, Superhuman gets a ton right... A Superhuman clone (maybe in VIM or Emacs) would be ideal if you don't want the AI features or the $40/month fee. Don't even need to change your mail address, since it connects to Gmail.

dkoprowski• 2 months ago

I think more and more about just moving back to Thunderbird client. Not ready though to give up on my google account, the calendar is too good.

stetrain• 2 months ago

A big question about this push for AI/LLM features in products, and I think very related to public sentiment on AI, is that if these features were so desirable and useful why do they need to be so forcefully promoted?

If these features were so useful, the internet would be full of articles and viral videos about how to turn them on and use them.

Instead, every single software service you sign in to now has to stop you with popups, chat windows, and sparkle animations to show you all of the shiny new AI features they have added, like they're all Microsoft trying to convince you to switch your browser to Edge.

hadlock• 2 months ago

Google announced at their annual blah blah last month that they want to be the center of your digital life. Gmail is probably their most popular/stickiest product after search, so there's a lot of pressure to make sure it is the loss leader in making your life "less complicated" or easier or whatever the thought leadership is this week.

If they can't make gmail effortless and easy with AI then the whole concept quickly collapses under its own weight. Unfortunately everyone has been doing email (gmail in particular) for literal decades now so adding AI feels especially forced. The "swipe to help you type" prompt actually blocks me pasting text into a new email in the android app which absolutely boggles the mind. I'm about to switch back to K-9 email client which I haven't used in probably a decade just so my email will work again.

dangus2• 2 months ago

The advantages Gmail had when it arrived on the scene just don’t exist anymore.

We have to remember that when Gmail was released, email providers were stingy on storage and decent web mail was unheard of.

Now, if you run over to a paid alternative like FastMail you’ll actually have a faster/better webmail experience.

I also think everyone should use email on their own domain so that it’s easy to kick your provider to the curb if they go downhill. As long as you own the domain you can do whatever you want.

mzmzmzm• 2 months ago

I use Fastmail for personal email, but my org is a Google shop. If you have "smart features and personalization" turned off it doesn't even try with AI tools, and I toggled that years ago to get it to stop doing the smart category stuff. The horrifying thing as they pile on "AI" features lately is realizing that most of my coworkers have a totally different email experience.

boston_clone• 2 months ago

I stopped using google as my primary email service a few years ago in favor of the custom domain integration that comes with iCloud+.

If you already have a domain and know what an MX or CNAME record is, it takes less than thirty minutes to set up.

Migrating critical correspondence / autopay / etc. may take some time, but observing how much spam continues to flow to your old inbox will certainly be surprising. Now, it is exceptionally easy for me to keep all messages read, and only use my google account for junk signup forms.

https://support.apple.com/guide/icloud/add-a-domain-you-own-...

https://support.apple.com/en-us/102540

LASR• 2 months ago

Forget all the AI stuff. Please make the subject editable by default. Come on Google.

alun• 2 months ago

Sending AI-generated messages can also be disrespectful to the recipient. Personally, I often just don't bother responding when I receive low-effort messages that are clearly AI-generated.

rldjbpin• 2 months ago

how about not using the web client and switching to a desktop/mobile one and importing your account there? it creates a standard experience across providers.

regardless if you aim to switch to a self-hosted one, it might look like this anyway.

switching emails is as annoying as changing phone numbers as you need to update it across everything in your life, digital or otherwise.

Gmail thinks I'm stupid, so I left

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