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.
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.
Probably the nothing to install experience. Every Android phone comes with Gmail and every device has a web browser. Do people have to install Gmail on iOS?
I'm using Thunderbird with POP3 accounts, download on my laptop then remove from the server, daily backups. My phone has K9 (the old one with the UI I like) and I never remove messages from the phone. When I send mail from the phone I bcc myself so I can see the message from my laptop later.
Why? Because I don't like to leave my mail forever on somebody's else server. They can lock me out at any time (it will probably never happen) and my mail is mine.
Would I recommend this to anybody? Of course not.
Is it a problem not to have access to all of my mail when I don't have my laptop with me? It never happened to be a problem and it's always less likely to be a problem because of all the messages that are exchanged outside email and on mobile first platforms, even for work.
“Great” isn’t how I would describe it. Searching for “delivery” from my inbox, when the third email in my inbox has a literal subject line of “delivery notification”? Zero results.
This is obviously better, but until just now it never occurred to me that this would be the way iOS users would engage with gmail, since I've only ever used Android. I always thought the iOS built-in email app was just for Apple mail or something.
I find myself using the web UI because it's much faster than MacOS Mail, which often gets a bit stuck when downloading new emails via IMAP. I'd prefer to use a native app, but it happened without me thinking - I just ended up going for the fastest option unconsciously.
Try Thunderbird. It's easy to set up IMAP to gmail, and it's very quick. Keep what you want on the server (or download and delete) and just never look at the web client again.
I wanted to use Thunderbird, but there is no Thunderbird for iOS (well, there is one in development, you can install it through TestFlight, but didn't work at all the last time I tried it). I try to use the same apps everywhere to have some consistency.
This is the way. Use a tui client like alpine or mutt, and enjoy managing 100s of thousands of emails in ms. I feel physical pain when I have to see colleagues and acquaintances wait for several seconds in their heavy web interfaces. I can manipulate batches of emails with terminal tools and the power of Maildir.
It's also IMAP is an awful protocol with so many glaring issues its impossible for a modern client to paper over them. Fastmail invented JMAP but it doesn't seem to have taken off with any other providers.
From memory, there are no bulk actions, so if you want to say select all emails and delete you have to send thousands of requests. If you want to rename a folder you have to send a request for every email in the folder. There is no way to set up filters that run server side, there is no way to get push notifications.
And probably a million other things that don’t hold up today.
Sending those thousands of requests is something your mail client does for you. Deleting 5000 emails takes a few minutes, but how often do you do that? I can select a bunch of emails in Thunderbird and just do stuff with it just fine.
For server side filters I just set them up in Fastmail using the web UI. That's the type of action I do once or twice a year, so totally OK to hop on over to the web app for just that.
I have no idea what you mean by 'push notifications'. I have Thunderbird open on my desktop, and it shows me when there is email. I have K9 on my smartphone, and it shows me when there is email (I don't have it set up to display notifications, but that seems possible). That's basically all I need to do email.
macOS mail app is a special type of terrible especially if you deal with multiple email accounts. Every os upgrade causes various bugs such as search index all of the sudden not working and you have to reset and reimport all your mailboxes
> - 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?
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.
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.
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.
All the comfort of the hemisphere least likely to suffer nuclear fallout coupled with the familiar warm embracing hug of the five eyes security panopticon.
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.
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.
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.
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.
There's like 1 spam message in my Gmail inbox every day. Some of it is so obvious that an LLM running on a Raspberry Pi can correctly classify it. For example car insurance ads.
(My email address is on my home page. It's also my username on over 100 sites that I signed up for over 20 odd years.)
Create a rule that moves messages with real email address to spam where they are deleted as soon as needed, then create tmp2026 alias to serve as your new default email address.
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.
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.
I think seeing superiority or obnoxiousness in the comment you replied to was a pretty large reading error on your part. The tone was sympathetic to people whose inboxes receive more than they can handle.
The last sentence of your comment sounds quite condescending.
The part of their comment I quoted is not particularly subtle in my opinion. It undercuts the superficially "sympathetic" tone. If they actually intended it to be sympathetic they should be more careful in their phrasing. I'm skeptical.
GP post is correct; you are reading way too far into it. Zero superiority intended.
I'm stating it as a style of how I manage my inbox. It's not some big achievement on my part. It's how I stop from feeling overwhelmed by my inbox. Everyone else can do whatever they want.
It's not like I'm that loyal to Gmail. But I've yet to find an alternative that replaces this functionality that I've become accustomed to. It's why I'm asking so many questions of people in this thread.
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.
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.
Ironically my experience with Fastmail was that every email ended up in spam. This included emails from myself, others from my own gmail, and even replies from people I'd emailed first. It was literally sending 100% of emails to spam. The spam filter setting was set to the most basic level, nothing aggressive, so I was forced to disable spam filtering completely. Luckily it was a new email so spam hasn't been an issue but that has slowly been changing.
I still love fastmail though. Top choice. But they do have quirks to work out even this many years in.
> every email ended up in spam. This included emails from myself, others from my own gmail, and even replies from people I'd emailed first.
It should go without saying, but that's definitely not the common (or expected!) experience. Our support team would be very happy to look into it for you: https://www.fastmail.com/support/
Normally when people see this kind of behaviour, it's because of one of the following:
* They've connected an IMAP client that has its own spam filter turned on, and it's actually this moving all the messages to Spam, not Fastmail's spam filter.
* They've accidentally mis-trained their personal filter by reporting email they want as spam.
Having said that, of course we can have issues on our end too — that's why we have a real human support team with the power to escalate to the relevant engineers.
I want to second this. Love Fastmail but I'm seeing the same mails that I constantly mark as "not spam" go into spam again and again. Their spam filter needs a lot of work. Otherwise I got a solid workflow (inspired by Hey) set ujp that I haven't modified in years that works for me
> 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.
I've tried Thunderbird, Kmail, and Apple's client, and maybe I just have too many emails, but these apps completely crumble under my inbox. I don't see any "shine" with these third-party clients. Mimestream, my favorite email client on macOS, "just works" because it uses the Gmail API. It seems like Fastmail made JMAP, but this doesn't seem widely supported.
Are there mail clients that actually support things like priority inbox and categorization that don't simply crumble for large inboxes?
Thunderbird does not seem to have auto-categorization from what I see, just filtering. Neither does KMail. Unless you’re referring to some addons? For apple mail you have to add it on each client. And a lot of comments are about how to disable it because it categorizes wrong.
> 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.
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.
I unsubscribe aggressively. I keep my inbox well maintained, but that's still not the feature I'm talking about.
My work sends me several shipping notifications a day, but they are not priorities. They are emails to be reviewed later in the day. I don't want push notifications for them. I don't want them in my primary inbox. Gmail (without me telling it to) puts them in the "updates" tab.
Same for the promotional emails that come in. They go in "promotions".
If I get a 2FA email or an update on a social website they are sorted in the "social" tab without my having to set anything up.
This is extraordinarily helpful for managing my email, and it is absent in every client I have tried.
Exactly. I do unsubscribe--perhaps not as aggressively as I should--but there's a ton of stuff I may want to be aware of that I don't want polluting my primary mailbox. Sometimes I even shift them to my primary tab but, in general, I'm happy with keeping my primary to stuff that I generally do mostly care about and have a few other categories I care about to varying degrees.
This has been my strategy. I've had location history turned off since they introduced the tabbed inbox because for some reason the only way to turn off the tabs was to never save my location history. Not sure how those features got co-mingled but...One inbox feels much nicer. I don't get a ton of email though.
I don't want to unsubscribe from everything that I might not be interested in at the moment but may want to skim now and then to various degrees. I find gmail is very effective for that sort of thing. I find gmail's tabs pretty useful.
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.
If I configure my rules today and then tomorrow I sign up for a new site do I have to amend my rules to also filter the new site? Because that's too much manual management. It's not a lot for a single site, yes, but x10 new sites a month it is too much. It's death by 1,000 cuts.
I don't ever have to do it with Gmail, and that is a tremendous amount of time saved. It is a lifesaver.
And then my banking updates go into promotions. Along with notifications I set up on streaming sites, and newsletters, and patreon posts. It's not that simple.
Someone creating a more intuitive, graph-based UI for rules would be good, otherwise it’s easy to get lost in the overlapping mess, like you have to run the ‘bank email’ rule run before the ‘promotion’ rule, but after the ‘important’ rule.
Gmail’s auto-sorting is extremely simple to look at, but is out of the user’s control, it’s like a secretary handling your letters instead of a predictable system
You can create one thematic alias and give it as your email to 1000 sites that belong to that category, they all will send millions messages to that alias.
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.
I would really like to learn the secret secrets to be able to stomach that enlightenment and I am enthused to learn about non-shitty cloud webmail integrations that don't make you want to shoot yourself within minutes.
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.
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.
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.
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 ;)
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.
When people are suspicious of anyone not wanting to be surveiled and spied upon, it says more about the state of the social group that it says about the privacy-minded individual.
And it means it's even more important to move away from that surveilance because it shapes opinions to sustain itself.
I do get that, but that is what you get when you offer strong privacy, it's probably similar with GrapheneOS, and Signal (though there it's much less visible). When I see someone using Proton it's a signal they align with my values regarding privacy. To me it's a good sign, actually, one of the (friend) relations I have, started with "Hey you are also on Proton." Turns out she's a frequenter of hacker festivals etc.
I use Telegram for bots btw, nothing beats the ease of the Botfather.
The only pain point I have is the search. Understandable, the emails are encrypted and search has to be done on the client. That works when using the web hi as you have the option to index all emails.
Agreed, there are quirks, and there is also an AI writer, though it never disturbed me and hope it never will.
But generally the UI is clean and they align with my values.
There is a bridge software that bridges Proton and imap so you can use any client. Never used it though, I find the apps pretty good. The latest generation is focussing on off-line use which will hopefully drive down down some of the latency, especially that of the calendar app is pretty bad atm.
My father somehow loves the search, but I myself am also unimpressed tbh. I do like the tagging system.
+ I'll add the obligatory complaint about the lack of Linux Protondrive client.
You can export mails, but only if you're on a paid plan.
Then you can install Proton Mail Bridge (which exposes a fake IMAP server to your machine) and a mail client (e.g. Thunderbird). Then you move all your mail from Proton to your new service by drag-n-dropping inside of your mail client.
I did it in order to move to Mailbox.org (great service), exactly because I don't want to give money to a company run by a Trump supporter.
Also, get ready to receive replies in which they tell you "Ackchyually he's not a trump supporter!!!1"
> You can export mails, but only if you're on a paid plan.
GDPR to the rescue: You have the right to data portability. All UK/EU email providers offer this (and any that don't may need a polite reminder for them to play ball).
> 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.
Anything can be taken from you at any time. Google can also just delete your account for no obvious reason. I guess that a domain can also be taken away but maybe not that easy. At least you can switch mail providers easily without having to change all your accounts that are based on your mail address.
I use a .nl domain for my country, luckily it is governed by a trustworthy party and there are strict rules and convenient systems to move domainnames between providers. Agreed that some tlds may indeed be less ideal in that respect.
I agree. I would never host my mail on those new fancy domains which are controlled by a private company. Only use geographic TLDs run by a trustworthy government.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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
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.
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.
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.
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)
Are you talking about false negatives? The problem I have is with false positives. It regularly throws important legit email into spam.
Just the other day it threw an invoice from AWS into spam! Regularly throws financial docs into spam. Like it’s hard for me to imagine how that happens.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I can appreciate LLMs for some use cases, but writing emails for the user is the one that really baffles me.
It's one thing if you don't speak English well and could use some help making yourself understood, but the amount of native speakers using this is so strange to me. How does this help you? If you can write to the LLM telling it what kind of email to write, you might as well just write the email.
The most frustrating thing to me is to receive a 5-paragraph-plus email that was clearly written with some AI that filled in the email with vapid and useless talking points, like "Let me know if you need any other blah blah blah; While there is clearly a need for system improvement, we are working hard to address the underlying and fundamental issue; This is a lesson that it's not just a feature, it's a critical path for our users, etc."
My theory is that people are fundamentally averse to the thought and effort it takes to write a good quality email. Then there’s probably some underlying belief that more volume shows more effort, which people will perceive positively. And finally, there's the worry that if you write the email yourself, you might make some embarrassing wording, grammar, or spelling mistake.
Specifically, lets imagine LLMs as compilers - you're passing your prompt through to get some pretty language at the end.
Don't send me your compiled code, send me your prompt. Let it be rude, if the wording is awkward I guarantee I can understand it just as well as an LLM, ignore the fact that my daughter just graduated and offering hallucinated platitudes.
Send me the actual question, don't make me try and decompile a big blob of empty text to the ten word prompt that contains all the actual meaning.
AI is a useful tool for a variety of purposes, what it is not useful for is expanding a short statement to an essay and reducing an essay to a short statement. Either the communication deserves to be an essay or ten words will get it done.
yeah this is what drives me crazy about LLM writing. Most of the time the prompt has all the info you need and is like maybe a few sentences. Then the LLM expands it into a few paragraphs...
I guess if someone is writing like a big fancy email to send out in bulk, maybe using an LLM to improve would make sense... but just emailing some coworkers it seems super lazy and insulting to send an LLM output :-I
if you are prompting such that the LLM isn't pulling context that the recipient doesn't have access to, then your email is likely marginal.
ie the prompt "Send 'bob' an email with a description of why the VPN bridge isn't working so they can debug their side" is a mostly useless as a prompt for anyone, it's only useful when the LLM has all the context of some analysis of the particular issue and what is going on and then injects it into the email.
Does the recipient already have that context? If you want to share some internal context (say you're a front-end specialist and the recipient is quite unfamiliar with the limitations of your framework) then maybe that'd be helpful? If it's just regurgitating already communicated information then either
1. You are restating the information because you don't believe the recipient understood it the first time and thus you should be very precise in your expression to make sure it isn't too arcane for them
2. The recipient appears to understand the information already in which case why restate it?
Actually, in professional usage in a technical setting this is my prime objection to heavily LLM driven development. Were the tools in usage deterministic then I'd be a lot less objecting to the mandating of their incorporation into workflows.
I want to be reading, writing, testing and maintaining the software at the same layer. Right now extreme AI usage leads to reading, testing and maintaining happening in a less expressive language than writing and guess which of those four activities developers enjoy the least and find the hardest - it sure isn't writing.
Either rely upon everyone else changing their behavior, or give up and use your LLM to re-compress incoming messages to be informationally dense as you see fit.
It's lossy tho. LLMs are crap at picking the "good stuff". Eg: the summary of the email covered the point about the family event but missed that the deal-terms were moving from Wyoming to Delaware.
Personally, I'm confident with my level of output so I'll continue to dutifully read all the crap that gets sent to me on company time. I'll just prefer to engage with people who communicate well and encourage that in others.
I wonder if slight grammar incorrectness (like not capitalizing your sentences or using abbreviations) is going to start becoming a signal of authenticity for people subconsciously. Maybe it already has.
I think rude was the wrong word to use. I more meant lacking the pomp and circumstance fluff. I always appreciate considerate and polite speech and think it's requisite to being taken seriously. However, I think directness within the bounds of politeness is optimal.
Also, if it's wall-o-text or "staging must be updated before our os version is deprecated sunday" I prefer the latter.
Yeah that attitude will not get you far in life unless you're Steve Jobs, and it'll sink your ship unless you're obnoxiously rich. And even if you're either/both of those things: A. you can and should act better, and B. people will always attach an asshole-asterisk to your name for the rest of your life and probably even a good while after.
Exactly. In my 25+ year career, I've encountered maybe two dozen or so people whose e-mails and chats were terse, yet admittedly succinct, one-liners and most of them were also raging assholes to work with. The ones who also didn't use capital letters or punctuation in their communications were uniformly assholes.
My experience is completely opposite. Majority of the people send short emails - sometimes badly written, sometimes well written. And when someone sends long emails, people dont read them. They kinda skim them and ignore the rest.
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
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.
It wasn’t Twain who wrote that letter: that quip was posthumously attributed to him, and have been used by multiple others.
The earliest source we have for it is a letter by Blaise Pascal, some 250 before Twain ever thought about writing letters, or anything else for that matter.
It’s the protocol of the brave new world, you and the recipient need a single sentence to communicate but the culture dictates using certain language and politeness + personal flavor so your AI helps you write culturally appropriate fluff and the person who receives it is using their AI to get rid if the fluff so you are both optimized for productivity through stripping the culture away making your interactions faceless and yourself fungible.
You can imagine this spread into dating as well, so you just have sex efficiently to optimize the breeding and hedonism.
At some point the protocol of expanding and then compacting with AI will also be removed to optimize the unneeded inference and people will again talk to each other but using the caveman language, stripped away from centuries of culture.
My ADHD rejects modernity. I shall type novels when engaged in discussions about feature design decisions and if your question has an easy answer I will give it to you shortly.
I absolutely agree with your opinion and I loathe it.
I (mostly) welcome _people_ writing medium to long form emails, slack posts, and pull request comment (and the like).
What really grinds my gears is when the clearly desired response is a few words or a single sentence, and what I get is a link to an obviously llm generated 3 page pdf full of em-dashes and emoji bullet pointed lists with very little relevance or context about the question.
If I wanted Claude or ChatGPT's response, I would have asked them. If I'm going to bother a cow orker with a question, it's because I want domain specific knowledge or workplace experience that might be important.
I'm more and more often internally reacting with "if you didn't bother writing it, I don't need to bother reading it".
I would welcome your 30 min or half day turnaround with a well written and thought response, over lazy/disrespectful colleges who are just doing the instant 2026 version of "just fucking google it".
Hey, speaking of gear grinding - have you run into LLM generated comments? I have always loathed JavaDoc and friends as I think it encourages vapid space filling comments that are inherently knowable from the code - when it's connected to a renderer (as was the original JavaDoc) so that the comments can be exposed without the code that is fine-ish - it serves a purpose and I can comprehend the rational but in most cases I've seen those comments committed without any intent to ever render them separately.
In the modern world we've got comments written by LLMs because "You've got to write a comment, of course, it's required!" but now the actually significant comments (the Why comments - as opposed to the What ones) are lost in a sea of LLM slop so no one will read them. Considering it'd be just as easy for the reader to point a conversational LLM at the codefile if they want the LLM interpretation of what's happening why are we bothering committing it at all?
Gosh that really grinds my gears. It's definitely a tangent but that being encouraged is a huge red flag for me.
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."
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.
Because it's already hard enough to get someone to understand what you're saying if you write full, flowing sentences.
Back when I did customer support, I occasionally dealt with people who lacked the capability to express themselves in written language. These weren't people born in other countries or people with some kind of intellectual disability, often they were just never taught how to read/write/compose a message.
There's also a social stigma to sending a job application written like "good. morning. sir i. wnt too. Wrk for ur Compny u. hve job. for Me im steven i.m" and so on, even if the job in question has nothing to do with any form of written communication.
Plus, there are plenty of things people just don't know how to do. I once had to Google "how do I write a letter of resignation" and Google will now generate a fulll message for you if you type "i want quit next month how write".
I think the author of this blog post assuming a prompt to help improve a message (obnoxious glowing button aside) somehow implies that Google thinks they're stupid showcases the perceived link between the ability to write and intelligence.
Obviously, using LLMs for this is just patching over the lack of resources put into (adult) education and literacy, as well as a societal shift to stop treating illiterate people badly. However, structural improvements take many years, probably several rounds of elections, and doesn't help someone today.
I don't use gmail but often get an LLM to write certain emails. The benefit is that it can pull in context and typically one-shot the email without me prompting it at all.
For example, a tenant emails me about some issue relating to a specific property. It can go through my leases, find the right one, check other emails to see I ordered a new appliance to that specific address, track shipping/install, all that, then reply appropriately.
I think your example is just customer support and not something that requires a personal touch anyway. Like your tenant doesn't care about your tone in that context, just the information. (It does seem like email is the sub optimal channel for this task anyway).
But if you're writing to someone with the intention of communicating personally, using AI anyway shows a lack of effort.
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.
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.
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?
>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
> 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.
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.
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.
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).
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?
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.
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!
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.
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.
Even "either time works" is only half-valid! If the other party has already declared their openness to either option, proper etiquette is to just select one so you can both move on with your lives.
That's actually a use case that I imagine could work well, if done well. Especially in fully integrated systems like GMail or our corporate Exchange, when the LLM can access enough data to produce meaningful suggestions.
IMHO the UX problem is, as the article points out in so many words, shoving AI slop down our collective throats as if we were geese waiting to be fattened.
If you’re getting so much email you can’t type five words, a button with wrong suggestions isn’t the solution either. Create your own text snippets with text expansion software and use those. They’ll always be correct and will truly save you time.
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
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.
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.
While I haven't had this issue with Gmail, I recently got a new computer and the first two weeks for full of moments like this. It's shocking to me how much we've let popups go rampant on everything. Perhaps the worst offender is Windows update, as it won't even let you use your own computer without clicking through 10 screens refusing all sorts of products they are trying to push on you.
I know everyone's tired of hearing this, but this doesn't happen on Linux. I know I know, it's different and a little janky here and there and maybe you have to find a replacement for one or two pieces of software. But like, you don't actually have to put up with this. There is a better way.
I recently built 2 mini PCs for my kids to play games on, and went with Bazzite.
It was really surprising how put together it all is. The steam integration is seamless and it can play a ton of stuff even on an older NUC w/out a GPU.
It was the first time I can say that installing a linux OS was easier and friendlier than Windows.
It's only getting easier and friendlier comparatively. Recently i bought a new computer and installing an external drive and putting kde linux on it was easier than fighting my way through the windows telemetry gauntlet, the setting, and all the bloat. Modern windows disgusts me continuously in new ways
Installing maybe… getting all the hardware to actually work was a completely different story. Broken WiFi was the norm. Bad display drivers that only worked in 640x480 or 800x600. Not to mention consulting website before installing to see how well your laptop was supported and what you could expect to never work.
So years ago you also generally had to understand partitioning and filesystem formats, which most people are clueless about.
Sure, they were learning opportunities, but most people weren’t trying to learn anything. They just wanted to get on MySpace, download free music, chat with friends.
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...
Coming from 10 years of Linux to macOS, Apple deserves praise for this point too.
I don't use Apple Intelligence, Safari, or Siri on my Mac, and I'm extremely happy to report that Apple does not nag me to use these features at all. THANK YOU APPLE.
Windows would open Edge for random reasons instead of my preferred browser to nudge me to use it, Cortana was a constant reminder in W10 because it was part of Windows Search, and of course, we all know how they push Copilot.
Apple isn't perfect (iCloud is fine on macOS, but iOS is quite misleading and often defaults to on even if you really don't want it), but overall my Mac respects my wishes as a user and it makes me look forward to using my computer as a tool.
To be fair, Apple does do a one-time sales pitch during OS setup, but if you say NO, it remembers you mean NO.
macOS does have its own user-hostile issues, but they are more in the form of making things like running downloaded software and modifying your system irritatingly difficult, and not Windows's pathetic and desperate attempts to cajole you into using their features.
I can't get my ipad to shut up about iCloud storage. At least with windows I know how to turn that stuff off (worse case registry fix). I have no idea how to hack Apple's stuff.
I just got off from their 50GB plan and the amount of nagging has been insane. There's a giant banner in the photos app, a banner in the health app and everything else that I removed from icloud backups, strongly suggesting (in what I must imagine would be a well-studied message designed to induce panic amongst less tech-savvy users) that I am in a perilous situation and must restore icloud backups immediately. Deeply shameful and has made me even more aware of their shenanigans.
Up until very recently gaming is the only thing keeping my l and millions of others main pc from being Linux or Mac. I dual booted in the past but was annoyed. With all the work steam has put in I’m personally about 6 months out from just dumping Microsoft on all my personal products.
It’s impressive they have dropped the ball so hard that it’s causing a complete rethink for so many users like myself. Bullet >> golden goose.
People will passionately tell each other to vote for [$moralParty], then willingly prop up companies which go against everything they stand for the very next day. Curious indeed.
Same here. What frustrates me is that Apple pretty much invented seamless multiple monitor integration back in the early 90s, but the Apple of today has either forgotten how to do it or they just don't care.
I have a iMac with two external monitors, and during boot it does this crazy dance where one monitor goes on, then off, then two monitors go on, and so on for a few rounds until shit settles and all three are on.
Windows gives you nice sliders for things, which they will happily break on a whim. Linux forces you to memorize a Lovecraftian string of characters to do something, but it will generally stick for a long time.
I use both, with differing ideologies. My Linux is heavily customized with keybinds and semi-niche software that enables my workflows because I know it will stick. On my Windows machines, I've accepted that Microsoft owns that machine and I have to adapt my workflow to fit their sensibilities.
I'm no Windows defender but this is nonsense. Windows has BY FAR the best multi monitor support of any of the major OS's, including any variant of Linux.
Are we talking about the same Windows that moves all your windows around when you temporary disconnect a display, even when the computer is locked?
Or is it the windows that sometimes ends up with windows positioned partially on a display that is no longer connected so that you can't move it because any control for that is offscreen.
You're probably right but it's really sad that an OS that shuffles everything you have open when it hits power save and turns off the screens would qualify as the best.
How do you get it to work then? Because at the moment whenever I open my Windows laptop plugged into a docking station the screens just come up in a random order.
Sometimes all three are mirrored, sometimes by chance they're the right way round, sometimes the "main" screen is one one of the external monitors and then you're absolutely knackered if you don't manage to convince it to go onto the laptop's panel before you unplug because there's no way to get it back.
It's all just so half-assed.
In Linux multiple monitors have worked perfectly for about 20 years.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Yes, I disabled all smart features. I'm surprised anyone here (or the type who bothers customizing their inbox layout) finds the Primary/Social/Promotions split useful. The original blog post mentioned "automatic thread categorization", which I thought just meant grouping emails in a conversation together (which doesn't really require any "smart" logic).
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.
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
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.
You know what's even worse? That if he had tried any of those "here look! we can write it for you!" tools he’d have found out that they don't even work.
Gmail summaries are nonsensical most of the times. The suggested replies completely miss the intent of the original message I was trying to write.
Most AI integrations around are basically alpha-quality code, that if there wasn't this forced pressure to adopt AI, AI, AI at any cost, they wouldn't have been shipped in this state at all.
Oh I got an email about a booked flight, Europe, Denver, Vegas. For some reason the times weren’t picked up in my calendar so I naively thought I’ll try their AI tools to put it there…
I tried to get it to work for five minutes, it couldn’t get it to work.
Then I was so pissed that tried for another thirty minutes to “prompt” my way to get the events created correctly, highlighted the timezone issues…
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
> 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!
There is exactly zero chance the gmail team is unaware that epiqnotice.com is a legitimate sender of class action messages and getting falsely blocked.
There is also zero chance that there are not a fair few people who consider their messages to be UCE¹ even if they are actually due thruppence-ha'penny as their share of the class action win, and who therefore mark them as such which is a signal that automated filter management algorithms will pick up on.
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[1] They are email, from a commercial entity, and in many cases were not asked for, after all.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
I really hope Apple watches what Google and Microsoft are doing with AI, specifically shoving it into their customers' workflow without invitation, and steers far away from that path.
Apple? The company that has built its entire brand and product lines around "we know what's best for you and if you don't like the way we've done it, you're wrong"?
You’re not wrong but so far they’re one of the only major companies in their cohort that isn’t shoving AI down our throats/integrating it into literally everything and begging us to use it with some embarrassing corporate plea.
Opting out of Siri is incredibly easy and there are no major features i care about that decision locks me out of. I think it has some impacts on CarPlay but it’s never stopped me from being able to put on music for my kids or whatever.
Frankly I forget I’ve opted out all the time because they never bug me to start using it.
Let's not pretend that fact is anything but a happy accident, though. The only reason AI has been practically scrubbed from their website is to try to make us forget the time they preannounced fantastically brilliant AI capabilities and then delivered less than nothing -- not even fixing Siri, which is the obvious #1 product in the world that needs to be rebuilt on LLMs.
Apple, maybe because of ego, is often not the major mover on anything they didn’t come up with first. They tend to take a wait and see approach with a lot of ideas. Hell look at VR (which I’m surprised they even did but clearly they see longterm value)
> 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.
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.
Feature A exists for years. New feature B enters. If you want to opt out of feature B, you now need to opt out of feature A as well, which you probably liked much more.
I don't know a better term than blackmail to describe this. Thesaurus seems to imply blackmail is for money, but so is extortion, and it doesn't give me good suggestions.
EDIT: Coercion is more correct, but it's way too mild in my perception.
> This time I’m doing things the right way by connecting my own domain to a mail host. I’m currently with Fastmail since they were by far the most popular option when I asked for suggestions on the fediverse.
Question for the general public: why Fastmail over Proton?
For more accounts/users (e.g. Proton Unlimited or Fastmail Family), the pricing is reasonable. But mailbox.org certainly looks like the best value at first glance unless you need a lot of storage. If you've got 6 users and/or several domains, FastMail does look pretty nice.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Yup, I was just giving them "thumbs down" on every suggestion, but I know I am screaming into the void.
But the fact that this feature exists in its current form (opt-out) means that nobody who tested it internally had the balls to just say "this is fundamentally the wrong direction, we should probably not do this". Don't be evil teehee.
I get the blue squiggly underline with suggestions on how I can improve what I write. I bet if I open up two drafts it will happily suggest contradictory improvements on it's own suggestions.
I'm starting to develop a squiggly line blindness, so be it if grammar in my email suffers :)
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.
You're probably right, I'm an idiot. I just think there's not much we can do about it, so might as well not take it too seriously. At least for the innocuous type of surveillance like reading my emails to learn how to sell me product. Things that you really want to keep for yourself shouldn't really touch the internet at all.
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.
No but they can train a model to know everything about you and sell it.
They actually have precedence in that as it’s their legacy ad business.
I could absolutely see them getting more proactive with their ad business. Something like mortgage brokers want to know you executed an offer on a new home (high indication you will be shopping for a lender). Then that turn into, your employer wants to know you’re talking to other employers. Then of course there’s many more nefarious examples people would consider more invasive but may not even realize it leaked from their email provider.
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.
I've also noticed Gmail spam filter became useless for anything but the most obvious scam/phishing, it seems any mass marketing gets thru as long as they follow some "best practices".
I've been using iCloud email with a custom domain for a while, and it has been super conveninent, stable and spam-free. I also trust Apple more than Google in terms of privacy rn. So if you already pay for iCloud, give it a try.
I'm on the other end, Gmail sends to spam all sorts of legit things. Including mails from the "Google Assistant Privacy Litigation Settlement", conveniently enough.
Related to this, I hate how aggressively Google pushes Gemini and all of the privacy implications involved with that.
1) Lots of features got moved around and there are now many "Write with AI", "Generate image with AI", etc buttons polluting user interfaces even though I don't use them and don't want to use them.
2) Actually, I would use some of these features if I didn't have to do a full opt-in to Smart Features for Google Workspace. If I'm writing a blog post and want to generate a cat picture, that doesn't mean I want to turn on invasive AI-enhanced features in every Google App under the sun. Gemini's chat interface is similar from I can tell: either I can see my search history but Google can train off of it, or if I don't want Google to train off of my chats then I can turn History off but then I can't view it myself. Why isn't there an option for me to see my history but not Google?? They're just the worst at caring about UX.
They've always been this way. I think until recently Google Maps would refuse to save your home address unless you enabled location history, so you had to type it in every time.
Bookmarks is a surprisingly underutilized feature of browsers, I constantly see tons of people doing 5-6 clicks going to some page, I'm guessing simply they don't know about it. Similarly, lots of powerusers who don't know about "javascript:" bookmarks that basically behaves like tiny like browser extensions (the content-script part specifically) when you click on them.
That's because due to modern PWAs (and less modern POST requests and cookies) you can bookmark a URL and it still won't actually work when you try to recall it. It's become a feature for power users.
For example, a naive user will think they can bookmark their shopping cart page and that'll snapshot the exact items in the cart.
I've noticed people tend to use their website's native bookmark feature, like insta saved posts, or they share pages with the google app to save them to a list. If a site has a Share button then you at least know it'll work.
It's the same on phones. You can't use Gemini as your default smart assitant without it also then becoming your default smart assistant for Android Auto, where it is useless.
It will happily find you some restaurant reviews for a town you are going to, but useful stuff like "Send a whatsapp to Jane Smith saying I will be 10 minutes late." or "Play XXX from Spotify" it totally fails at.
I just signed up given the low price, got it setup with K-9 POP on my phone. Gotta say that is a very simple and easy to follow setup. Compared with something like Zoho where I get lost everytime I need to navigate around.
I'm really liking this, thanks for the recommendation.
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
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?
My Mother received an email from her supermarket confirming her delivery date. It said they were coming tomorrow morning while she was out. She'd just made the booking for a completely different day so she couldn't understand it. She is very old and this confusion made her think her mental decline had accelerated. She was quite distressed.
I looked at her gmail (I don't use it) and it took me a moment to realise I wasn't looking at the email. I was looking at an AI summary of it, and it was completely wrong. The only important information in the message was the delivery date, and the AI had hallucinated a different one. So I disabled the AI features.
But I do wonder how many people have, for example, missed job interviews or funerals because of this bullshit. Google has utter contempt for their users.
Yeah, this is infuriating indeed. If we wanted to use halfbaked AI we'd know where to find it. But shoving it instead of the real thing is extremely annoying. I remember Google+ fiasco, trying to shove their + everywhere. It didn't go well for Google+.
Heck, I order pizzas online regularly (one of the only types of account I haven't migrated off to other email addresses, because it's not very important), and my ASAP pick-up orders usually get an "Arriving tomorrow" banner in the Gmail interface.
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.
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.
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.
I avoided Linkedin for many years before finally breaking down and signing up while job hunting. If you had shown me the actual feed content out of context and asked if it was real or satire I would have guessed satire. So much of the content that gets posted is such an absurd cliche it's self-parodying.
The 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.
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.
At work, we use Google Workspaces so that we have gmail and google docs and google sheets, and the "features" noted in this post have all shown up for us. That said, we were able to turn them off and haven't been bothered by them since. I don't remember the process being hard at all. That said, it's still something you need to do to have your settings not be the default settings, but is that necessarily any worse than any other setting you like to change away from the default?
Settings -> All Settings -> Smart Features -> Turn on [off] smart features in Gmail, Chat, and Meet...
If you disable that feature, all AI everything goes away (including sorting by category). There are some more targeted features you can disabled to disable writing helpers if you want.
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).
What surprises me most about gmail and AI is that they seem really quite bad at filtering out obvious spam. I get so many messages from people I have never heard from, on relatively new domains, with endings like "if this isn't relevant for you right now, say "not now" and I'll not circle back" (a clear attempt to allow unsubscribe without using the word).
How is it that they haven't figured out how to stop these messages from getting through? I'm at the point that I'm considering those email services that require the sender to confirm they're human before an email is delivered. It would be a hassle to people I communicate with (once), but the ongoing hassle to me is sizable enough that I'm considering it.
If it was profitable for them to fix it they could probably fix it immediately. They don't care because it's no longer profitable for them to provide excellent service.
They only care about providing a service that is just good enough to keep enough people from jumping ship.
And the cool thing is that damn near every company on the planet is doing the same thing right now so even if you DO jump ship you aren't guaranteed anything better, just shitty in different ways.
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.
My account is ancient; every spammer in the world knows it.
But practically no spam gets through. And there are very few false positives. Going though my spam folder, I see a few legitimate commercial emails that I don't care about, but the rest is junk.
Most of it is being dropped on the floor without even getting into the spam box. I have only 65 emails in my spam folder. A few years ago, there were tens of thousands. I don't know what they did, but at some point they clearly started rejecting the worst of the worst, i.e. the vast majority of it.
I have no idea why your experience is so different. I'm on a Google Workspace; perhaps that's something?
The worst part for me are the false positives. I frequently need to get into the spam folder to discover emails that Gmail thinks they are spam, even though there is absolutely no reason for it. I have been thinking about leaving it.
> a clear attempt to allow unsubscribe without using the word
I would have assumed it was primarily an attempt at getting you to verify the address is a real, monitored inbox. I guess it's probably a 2 birds with one stone kind of thing, lie about a way to unsubscribe to get off the spam filter and mark the email as a prime target for other domains.
I think there might be a small domain reputation boost to having you reply. Email providers score your domain on reply rates sometimes, as well as open rates & whether you're marked as spam.
Do you suppose they are running the messages through any LLM? I don't know. I would guess it's too much volume to run all mail through a "good" model, but no idea whether it would be feasible to run mail through the kind of dumb model that generates "AI Overviews."
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.
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
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.
Doing SEO/marketing tricks on behalf of your competitors which gets them penalized by Google is a form of blackhat SEO with a rich tradition & history.
I get spam in my gmail all the time. And worse. Just minutes ago received a very official looking email from Bank of America telling me I had received a wire transfer.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Just don't use the Gmail interface. Use your own mail reader.
Don't conflate "Gmail the UI" with "Gmail the mail provider".
Having said this - I never used Gmail for anything serious - I had my own domain + mail etc since before Gmail existed, and the reason was I got tired of "free" tools making my life miserable.
> Sure, I could switch to a different mail client and never see any of these language model features, but my experience these past months has left such a bad taste that all I’m looking for now is a clean break.
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.
> 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).
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.
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.
It is admittedly a bit beyond "easy customizability" once you find yourself sifting through element attributes in the dev console to craft a selector ("easy" shouldn't require knowing what any of those things are, I would think), but in case you still want to actually do it, this seems to work.
They have an ungodly number of event listeners. Why do they need so many? And I keep finding spans nested inside spans for no reason; i.e., the parent span only contains a child span. It's such an outrageous mess
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!
Google can’t spend two decades getting bazillions of people to rely on what’s essentially internet infrastructure at this point, and then pretend their hands aren’t dirty when they suddenly crank the enshittification juicer up to 11 because they need to justify the gobsmscking capex for their largely hated new service. There’s nothing legally stopping them from doing that, but that’s very different than right and wrong.
I guess you might need to use AI to summarize the article for you, because he addresses the fact that you can’t turn the intrusive AI off without also turning off some things he finds helpful.
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.
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.
> 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).
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.
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.
Is it something about using Chrome? My wife's Gmail was showing the "Press / to help me write" prompt last week and we couldn't figure out (1) how to turn it off nor (2) why _I_ wasn't seeing any such prompt in _my_ Gmail, despite all our Gmail settings being the same as far as I could tell.
We both use Chrome (she on Windows, me on Mac), but I could totally believe that I've turned off some shiny AI feature _in Chrome_ that she hadn't.
Anyone care to confirm or disprove the hypothesis that there's some setting in Chrome itself that will disable this Gmail feature?
I 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
I often think about leaving gmail, but it's not clear what the better option out there is, that doesn't create a bunch of pain in terms of not having good replacements for the rest of the ecosystem.
If it's just email, then Fastmail wins hands-down, IMO. I've been a customer for 20+ years. On my primary Google account I don't even have a Gmail account at all, but a warning if you set it up like that -- some Google products do not work at all, e.g. you cannot connect Docs to Gemini without an @gmail.com address. It will give you a prompt that looks like it came from 1998 and ask you to sign up.
I keep a separate Google account with an @gmail because some web sites don't even let you sign up with non-major-provider domains these days.
Your google account still works for drive if you switch from gmail to fastmail or proton or whatever. If you associate it with a domain you control you can even move the same email address between providers.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
Please Google let me buy my email and move it to my own service without any restrictions and I will be thankful. I am now in too deep to move away, from my govt licenses to banks to everything else.
Switching away from Gmail isn't possible for me, but I will keep trying, I won't give up but hopefully I would never have to realize how big a mistake this was.
I feel like I might end up on the streets if gmail goes away. Hyperbolic but it's insane how true that feels.
Much like planting a tree, the ideal time to use your own domain for email was many years ago, but the next best time to do it is today.
Do it! minraws.com (if that means anything to you) is available, you could be firstname@minraws.com as well as your @gmail.com before the sun goes down. Personally, I'd set it up to feed into a new mailbox with Protonmail, but if you like you can just have it forward to the familiar gmail inbox you're used to.
You can start moving your accounts over one at a time. It doesn't have to be instant. Yeah, there are probably IRL business cards in drawers and people you haven't contacted in decades that will mean that you want to forward all emails that go to your gmail to a folder/label in your new email domain forever, but that's OK.
Already have one but moving old services especially banks, and licenses and very old accounts and so on is such a PITA. I had to fill a dozen forms to move one of my govt accounts to my new email. This is not fun..
Why can’t you migrate? It took me a year to move my business to protonmail. I had to change about 200 accounts but we finally moved. I’m curious what the hard limit is for you.
govt stuff, they have 3-6 month cycles for updating details in my country for certain stuff... stuff that can be changed online is better but there is stuff where i need to go to the office
create a new account elsewhere. set up a forwarder from gmail -> new account. create a filter/label in your new email. when you get an email at your new account, update the service to use your new email.
this way it doesn't all have to happen at once; you can take your time and just leave the old gmail account up as a forwarder. save all your old emails to your computer for historical stuff, then delete them from gmail if you feel the need.
it doesn't have to be a huge painful transition - you can do it slow and steady :) i've been meaning to do the same for a while but i need to find an email provider i like that lets me bring my own domain.
I 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.
Making a 10 min email/work doc used to take far longer than 10 mins. Now it takes far less. This breaks the built-in guard against wasting people’s time.
I wonder if a minor UI change might help a bit: make it normal to show “approx 15 min read” in the email/whatever interface.
Just some sort of “this is the baseline amount of work you’re asking of the recipient.”
If you can't articulate your ideas correctly and immediately, this mean you have zero understanding about what you need to convey in a message and your prompt will only lead to an unusable and uninformative garbage of an email.
Instead of gaining time, you make everyone lose time.
I actually loathe those "approx whatever time to read" notices for about the same reasons the OP lists.
You or your model do not have and can not a clue how fast or slow I read, or, and that is the point, how much time I intend to spend on whatever is up.
The mirror is that you cannot know who my recipent is, or what I'm trying to communicate. It is equivalent in this sense.
You only [propose to] clutter the already overcluttered interface with crap, slop and shit. So bugger off pretty please. If you do not, there goes your product: outta my window.
I think it’s different when it’s shown to the author, not the reader. It’s basically a word count feature, which has been useful since forever. Except it doesn’t translate into a unit that really means much for this context.
Yes yes yes, it won’t be one size fits all and all those uninteresting “but what if…” points.
What we want is to cue the slop generator just what they’re producing for their coworker or whoever.
I hate getting huge pages of careless slop that the unthinking author probably imagined would look impressive.
Maybe only show it as a result of the user pressing the “generate slop” button. Otherwise it’s not needed for normal, human emails.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
The key point here is not that they think you’re stupid but that they refuse to let you say no.
One of the Google founders (Sergei I think) read the book “nudge” and fell in love with it. What Google product managers fail to realize is that a hard nudge is called a shove. And removing the ability to say no is theft of consent.
They continue to do it because it works and there’s nobody left there with enough courage to stop them.
> "nobody left there with enough courage to stop them"
I'd add it's also that there's nobody left to compete with them, either. They own the only desktop browser that matters, and basically the entire concept of the mobile phone itself outside the US (Android), and it seems like 50% or so of the corporate email market, 80% of the consumer email market, a high percentage of the advertising market. I don't think pre-1984 AT&T had half the dominance Google does.
Gmail has three main features that matter (to me at least) -- and they are huge, very important features. And as much as I don't like this fact, using their official web or mobile clients are the only way to get them:
1. Accurate, deterministic, fast search of your email
2. Whatever they call the categorized inbox, I use "Primary," "Promotions," and "Updates."
3. Labels implemented as labels, not mapped clumsily onto the "Folder" concept.
If I were told I had to not use the Gmail UI, I would 100% switch to another email provider immediately, as using Gmail the service with a vanilla IMAP client is way worse than just using a normal email host with the same.
Thunderbird works well for my needs. I just want to see my emails categorized in reverse chronological order. I don't expect or want any kind of filtering; I would just Sieve filters for that (running on my own server). Perhaps I am just old fashioned. Should I want AI assistance to write an email, I would fire up a local model such as GPT-OSS. Local models are more than capable for trivial tasks like this, and a smaller model on CPU only would also work.
You quoted the very first sentence. They acknowledged your point later:
> Sure, I could switch to a different mail client and never see any of these language model features, but my experience these past months has left such a bad taste that all I’m looking for now is a clean break.
The brand/trust is ruined for OP even if there are workarounds to not directly see what Google's doing anymore.
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.
> 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!
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.
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?
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.
I still use gmail, and so far only a few spam messages have gone through. They really built a solid system, but the web ui is just not a good experience, so thank god for thunderbird too.
Really? Because I have 4 Gmail accounts, all from the days of 100 invites. Two have been used publicly in systems, etc the other two have never been input into a system. I have equal amounts of spam hitting the inbox in all of them. It’s better then say outlook.com but not much.
> “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".
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).
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.
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.
The message they're trying to send is not "we think you're stupid" so much as "we know you hate this, let us make it easier."
The problem is that they don't offer a way for you to say "no, thank you, I'll write my own emails", because they are dumping so much money into this thing and if people don't want to use it they can't justify feeding the token machine.
You can turn a lot of this stuff off by having a Google Cloud account and using their "business-class" product, which gives you the power to turn off these features (most of them, anyway) for your "employees". I'm already doing that because I use Google for a bunch of stuff, but if I wasn't, I might switch away from Gmail as well.
I 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!
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?
> 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.
> 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.
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).
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I setup lieer and notmuch with an alot front end which was the first time I was able to get my Gmail inbox under control.
Unfortunately, I’m not up for learning a completely new set of keyboard shortcuts anymore and alot doesn’t provide a nice interface either, so i don’t use it much more.
I 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.
It’s interesting to me that “gives all my private correspondence to federal police without a warrant or judicial oversight” isn’t enough to get people to quit gmail, but “offers to write my email replies for me” is.
Adults shouldn’t use gmail. I think less of people who do.
I 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.
It still amazes me that Google and Microsoft and most of the rest of the "AI-first" companies continue to believe that shoving AI down our throats will eventually cause us to like it.
I've never been waterboarded, but I'm pretty sure that if somebody ever waterboarded me I wouldn't drink water for the rest of my life.
Google/Alphabet collects massive amounts of information on us, for commercial and US-governmental purposes. It's good that Jerremy has dropped GMail - but he should not have adopted it in the first place. Large commercial corporations (especially though not only in the US) should not be entrusted with so many people's private mailboxes and communications, nor subsube so much of people's activity on the Internet.
Unfortunately - one can't really leave GMail until others leave as well, in that Google will still have a copy of all of our email exchange with people who still use GMail.
It doesn't matter whether Google thinks we're stupid or not - it's always thought we are suckerds, and to a great extent, we are.
Anyway, friends shouldn't let friends use GMail. Try any number of email service providers. I personally like Proton Mail (https://proton.me/mail) as far as privacy-minded webmail goes, but it doesn't have to be, nor should it be, one provider for everyone.
> 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.
My brain immediately fills in the whole story that happens after this.
1. Someone links this post in an internal Slack-like app to relevant PMs and designers.
2. Someone in leadership respond "dang we should look at this deluge of CTAs". In doing this they pretend as though it's new information that people didn't have until now, since that avoids anyone being responsible, even though every single engineer and the designers that still have their idealism are full aware of it.
3. Some PM is assigned a project of cleaning up CTAs, which they half-heartedly do, and the situation is slightly better afterwards, although nobody is accountable or really cares and the same problem will happen again for the next round of launches, since everyone's OKRs are tied to getting users NOW and CTAs that stupid people click on / random people accidentally click on are the best way to drive a metric in the near future. Somehow they manage to spin the cleanup as a positive and wholesome metric-moving project instead of what it is, which is doing extra work to fix other peoples' negligence.
4. Nothing like introspection happens because the org is entirely driven by short-sighted metric-maximization. It continues to gradually rot, losing the engineers and designers who care about the users, with the main decision-making roles turned over every couple years so pointless pms and managers can stick stars on their resume.
5. In a few years when the accumulation of misanthropic decisions starts to actually affect metrics in a way that nobody can easily bandaid, some executive will start a new project to do something about modernizing the whole app. A bunch of people will ship things to clean it up, and a new design will launch with a bunch of user studies that validate it as better. It will almost certainly be worse, but nobody cares, they just need work to do, and they'll massage the metrics to make it good enough until they can switch roles again.
6. At no point will the organization be capable of anything like shame, which is a shame because that is what is needed: someone in charge has to believe in doing things because they are good for the users and not for mindless metric-moving, and hold those under them accountable accordingly. Instead we get this, which is basically the long-term symptoms of going public in an industry where user growth and retention are not very quickly correlated with changes in the product. As a result bad product changes alienate users slowly and there is little incentive to make good changes, because neither result affects anything in the next few quarters. So instead you get this bullshit: because it's an easy way to hit OKRs and get promoted, and people's bosses have no reason to disagree because it's a cheap way for them to hit OKRs and get promoted also. Not that they're wrong. When the goal of the company is mindless optimization instead of anything socially positive, maybe this is truly what optimal behavior looks like. Although you can be sure that internal messaging nevertheless focuses on how socially positive the changes are. Gotta keep the illusion going so nobody realizes their job is shameful.
Or maybe that won't happen. But ... I've been around this cycle a few times, at companies who inherited Google's contemptible style of management. Somehow feels like I've seen this before.
I am also considering leaving Gmail over the blue squiggly lines trying to tell me how to "improve" my phrasing.
I like the nuance my words convey, Google.
I don't need to sound like an LLM with no sense of personality. My phrasing is chosen very deliberately to draw a very precise picture. I don't appreciate you trying to blur it.
What I fucking hate more than anything else is this new nonsense about me approaching the 15 GB limit and then when I want to clean things up, it has zero tools that make any sense. Like just let me sort all of my messages with the largest sized messages on top. Instead it gives me some random selection of messages of varying sizes, most less than 1 MB. You cannot sort it in anyway. Horrible. Horrible I am so angry.
Google, if you’re listening, the only thing I need in the cleanup tool is a sort all mails by size option. That’s it. Just put the biggest one on top and sort down from there.
You can use the advanced search to find mails larger than X.
Also if you're not aware, Google Photos lets you downscale photos and videos so they don't count towards your quota at all. See "Recover storage" on https://photos.google.com/quotamanagement
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.
> 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.
Maybe ot is just me, but gmail users can go.. [fill the blank]. It is one thing to not value your own privacy, but not valuing that of other people is unacceptable.
Sure using the mysteriously free webmail client of that ad-company may be convenient, but the people who have to interact with you (or with whom you chose to interact) did maybe not make that choice. Forcing on them is not only rude, it should be illegal.
I am not saying you need to run your own mailserver (although I do, mailcow is great), but maybe paying for an email service that respects your another peoples privacy makes sense in a world where a single email is the key to your kingdom.
And I say that because AI that writes responses has to read your mails first. I am sure Google won't use that gathered information for any other purpose than suggesting a reply. /s
Seems silly to upend your entire account. Just use a different email client. Email protocol was designed specifically so you could do that, anytime you want.
I don’t understand. Do the people generating ‘content’ with LLMs themselves enjoy pissing away their own time ingesting the output they’re asking an LLM to produce?
For all the amazing creative work carefully (or not) crafted by humans directly, you’d rather have the derived token sausage?
Writing with intent to deceive a human, and otherwise generating ‘art’ with models is the laziest application thereof, and I’d argue it’s unethical. If you generate something and present it to me as your own work, worthy of direct human consumption and thus, my finite human heartbeats, I instantly have a problem with you.
Email in perfuckingticular: if your actual reply is “yep, meet you there!” And you ask the LLM to expand it and bloat it in some way, what’s the justification?
> [Stupid Other People] enjoy pissing away their own time ingesting the [LLM] output
Stop. Yes yes, you are a fine writer with excellent communication skills. You would never stoop so low as to allow a mere machine to write for you, and no such device is going to have anything but the most banal suggestions you would accept (I mean, even the most elite of us make the occasional typo, amirite?).
Many people (most, really) hate writing. It's just difficult, for the same reason that you probably avoid, I dunno, dancing or public performance. People have different skills.
And people who hate writing and know they aren't that great at it still know that their email is likely to land in the inbox of a snob like you. So... they ask for help where they can get it.
To wit: be nice. You're letting your ego drive you to some unpleasant places. There's a fine line between chuckling at inappropriately-AI-enhanced communication and just being an asshole.
I understand that this is frustrating for people who mostly write thoughtful emails. But personally I use gmail for exactly the following things: account recovery, system notifications, and b2b email threads. For the latter, I really couldn't care less about form or shape. It's a tool to an end, to get a point across. I found the auto writing stuff pretty useless so far (suggestions change the intended tone or even meaning of the email) but summaries are very useful to get a grip what happened in a larger thread which I should only know the gist of anyway.
I might be in the minority but to me email is an annoying requirement to reach out to people, and that is not due to the AI tools, it's due to: thread management, the horrible noise of unasked for newsletter, and system messages and updates I theoretically do care about but that are just inconsistently formatted and badly listed. I welcome AI giving me a better overview over what's going on than what I myself have.
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.
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