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...
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.
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.
But luckily you’re about 5 email filter rules away from your ideal setup.
I don't ever have to do it with Gmail, and that is a tremendous amount of time saved. It is a lifesaver.
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.
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!
I’ve used the button before, but I think my life would be exactly the same without it.
Plus it's a huge waste of natural resources for the energy usage!
The Valley is tripping over themselves to convince the world fancy autocomplete is worth 800 billion.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
How insane is it to advocate the usage of these non-deterministic compilers, where each time you compile may produce different semantics?
And then people resort to saving and hand-editing the compiled output.
But when they want to change the source, they recompile and have to start over hand-editing the output again.
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.
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
Most people I know are happy to receive a focused email rather than an LLM-enhanced, 6 paragraph wall of text.
Also, if it's wall-o-text or "staging must be updated before our os version is deprecated sunday" I prefer the latter.
Which is promptly and ironically summarized by AI on the receiving side
Hopefully, LLMs will kill that attitude in the long run
So LLMs have no place for me in this regard.
I didn't have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead. - M. Twain
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.
(Did an LLM write your post?)
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.
I absolutely agree with your opinion and I loathe it.
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".
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.
I've seen some very incomprehensibly-written communication in my time, including from people who speak English as a first language.
The most frustrating group of consistent offenders I've seen was comprised of folks who absolutely should know better: School teachers.
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.
But if you're writing to someone with the intention of communicating personally, using AI anyway shows a lack of effort.
The weird thing is, if I commented on a channel and they sent me an AI-generated reply, I'd just hate them forever.
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.
It is maddening how much they are pushing this useless and inaccurate garbage on us.
Mentioned it in an off-topic company chat but the boss has gotten tired of people thinking badly of Google now that we're using Google Workspace that 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 the actual program) and the chat was dead after that...
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 been that way for about 20 years. Where have you been?
It certainly was not as easy to setup as Windows.
its such a breath of fresh air
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.
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.
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.
Does Microsoft understand consent?
[ ] Yes
[ ] Ask again later Upgrade to MacOS Tahoe?
[ ] Yes
[ ] Remind me laterRecent betas also seem to break some small things, not sure if due to change in code itself or a faulty migration.
Google really was competent in the 2005-2020 era (probably further on the left, that’s just as far as I remember).
I don’t think Microsoft has seriously disappointed anybody paying attention since 2012 or so.
I 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.
For GMail, go to Settings -> General (https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/#settings/general) and scroll down to "Smart features" and disable that.
Then go to the next option, "Google Workspace smart features" and disable them across your entire workspace with 1 or 2 more toggles.
Finally, just switch to Fastmail or something. :-)
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
I tried to get it to work for five minutes, it couldn’t get it to work.
Then I was so pissed that tried for another thirty minutes to “prompt” my way to get the events created correctly, highlighted the timezone issues…
Then gave up and did it manually in 2 minutes.
It’s to train their AI models. You hate it and then fix it. AI gets “better”.
LLMs have made one thing clear: intellectual laziness is even more pervasive than we previously thought, even among "knowledge workers".
Do I need to add some sarcasm tag? Hope not as it would prove my point.
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 a software feature designed to benefit Google at the expense of the user.
Malformed Software. or, malware.
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.
The blog post sounds like Google is actively making AI work against their users.
Google, Apple, and Microsoft won't give you such control. It's going to be AI on terms terms and for their own benefit.
Question for the general public: why Fastmail over Proton?
mailbox.org € 30.00 / $34.71
10GB+5GB storage, ample aliases, multiple domains, up to 10 family accounts
proton.me € 41.04 / $47.88
15GB storage, 1 account, 10 encrypted email addresses, 1 domain
fastmail.com € 51.44 / $60.00
60 GB storage, 1 account, multiple domains
For more accounts/users (e.g. Proton Unlimited or Fastmail Family), the pricing is reasonable. But mailbox.org certainly looks like the best value at first glance unless you need a lot of storage. If you've got 6 users and/or several domains, FastMail does look pretty nice.
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.
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.
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.
Whoever thought such a product would be a good idea should be fired.
Scroll down to:
Grammar suggestions off
Spelling suggestions off
Writing suggestions off (probably the one you want)
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'm starting to develop a squiggly line blindness, so be it if grammar in my email suffers :)
This is all a solution looking for a problem, pretending that people don’t have time to read or write their own email.
With both Google search and email Google is willing to replace reality with uncertain pseudo-reality. I find it extraordinary.
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.
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 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.
it's a very cheap no-nonsense service, i recommend it
As for the email client I personally prefer Thunderbird on PC and FairEmail on Android.
I'm not without my questions about them as a company, but Google are getting beyond a joke.
Full migration away is coming with next phone upgrade.
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
Once done, users still get the...
"Press / for Help me write" or
"Press / to write using your GMail and Drive"
In this particular case, if the whole UI is irredeemable, you can access your mail with IMAP or POP.
I did try this without success.
> if the whole UI is irredeemable, you can access your mail with IMAP or POP.
I access my mail across a doz machines - and I support scores of users. Setting up stand-alone/3rd party clients (at scale) is a bit unwieldy.
The bad actor here turns out to be the Chrome browser. Every other browser behaves better in this.
Yes it is.
We pay $6-$14 per user per mo, for the privilege of dealing with GMail's foistware.
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.
Art, I tell you, its art. Now with AI.
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.
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).
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.
How is it that they haven't figured out how to stop these messages from getting through? I'm at the point that I'm considering those email services that require the sender to confirm they're human before an email is delivered. It would be a hassle to people I communicate with (once), but the ongoing hassle to me is sizable enough that I'm considering it.
They only care about providing a service that is just good enough to keep enough people from jumping ship.
And the cool thing is that damn near every company on the planet is doing the same thing right now so even if you DO jump ship you aren't guaranteed anything better, just shitty in different ways.
My account is ancient; every spammer in the world knows it.
But practically no spam gets through. And there are very few false positives. Going though my spam folder, I see a few legitimate commercial emails that I don't care about, but the rest is junk.
Most of it is being dropped on the floor without even getting into the spam box. I have only 65 emails in my spam folder. A few years ago, there were tens of thousands. I don't know what they did, but at some point they clearly started rejecting the worst of the worst, i.e. the vast majority of it.
I have no idea why your experience is so different. I'm on a Google Workspace; perhaps that's something?
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.
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 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.
I wish Google'd link them together.
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.
Do you want Google to block all mail to you relatively new domains?
PD: I contacted that person and I formed about the situation some time ago.
The issues the author describes are issues with Gmail’s web interface, not with the email service itself.
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.
I focus the message body area and underneath my cursor appears
the message “Press / for Help me write”.
I had been using Chrome for just Gmail, because of Gmail's sabotagey hostility toward Firefox. On my 10+ machines I swapped Chrome for Bromium, ungoogled Chromium, Brave and a couple of others I don't recall.
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?
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).
Using AI allows him to feel a lot more confident in what he is writing, particularly when I suggested he tell the LLM tone (friendly and professional) he was wanting.
I've used gmail for corpo email since, but I don't have a choice there.
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.
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.
they really don't know how to integrate AI into it at all, and honestly I think a part of that comes down to a little bit of column a and column b. Where column a is that they are constrained by privacy and column b is they are constrained by complete politics driven work cycles that don't allow them to rethink or rework things at all or try things out.
I'm pretty sure to do a single change it requires 50 coordination calls with like 5 different executive levels 8 kpi alignment meetings 6 product managers in varying different rooms 3 different user group studies and finally after all that you might be able to ship something but it's nothing close to what you or the user originally wanted.
such is the way of "startups"
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.
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.”
Instead of gaining time, you make everyone lose time.
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.
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.
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.
Do it! minraws.com (if that means anything to you) is available, you could be firstname@minraws.com as well as your @gmail.com before the sun goes down. Personally, I'd set it up to feed into a new mailbox with Protonmail, but if you like you can just have it forward to the familiar gmail inbox you're used to.
You can start moving your accounts over one at a time. It doesn't have to be instant. Yeah, there are probably IRL business cards in drawers and people you haven't contacted in decades that will mean that you want to forward all emails that go to your gmail to a folder/label in your new email domain forever, but that's OK.
Just start.
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.
In the margins: the user.
It feels almost like these companies have too many devs just cramming in features to justify their existence & year end performance review, rather than considering whether it is an actual improvement to the user's use case.
Gmail is also starting to really get on my nerves with their enshitified UI. Every button looks different (presumably each "owned" by someone else). It's full of popup overlays you need to click away to get to the interface. On iphone 1/3rd of my inbox real estate is currently a banner about data sharing controls?
I just want to write emails guys...
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.
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.
Except for the largest and most profitable company in the world, that is.
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.
It sounds like they use plenty of software so they must be incredibly lucky, picky, or both.
> I go to check my email in Gmail’s web UI.
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.
> Sure, I could switch to a different mail client and never see any of these language model features, but my experience these past months has left such a bad taste that all I’m looking for now is a clean break.
The brand/trust is ruined for OP even if there are workarounds to not directly see what Google's doing anymore.
The 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.
There is no guarantee today that any software manufacturer will not slap AI whenever, wherever they can.
I want stuff to work like linux commands. Do one thing well. Work well with other processes over a standard protocol.
If you ever find a good email client @speckx let me know. Something that does not get in my way, can work on mac/windows/iphone/android, can work offline, can do basic things like search predictably (I'm look at you apple mail) and (FFS!) does not show me random unread badges on folders where everything is already read (You again, apple mail).
I 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".
People using LLMs to send emails for other LLMs to summarize and then the other party responds with their LLMs.
Human communication replaced by wasteful slop of no value.
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.
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.
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 bumps over all the other buttons to the right.
The home or work button gets replaced with the AI button.
This is infuriating for muscle memory.
Whoever did this will need to beg my forgiveness if we ever meet.
to where?
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.
Unfortunately, I’m not up for learning a completely new set of keyboard shortcuts anymore and alot doesn’t provide a nice interface either, so i don’t use it much more.
But the enshittification of mail is dismaying.
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.
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.
Also known as Promo-Driven Culture
is over here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48373054
> 1) Lie to people who want to be lied to, and you’ll get rich.
> 2) Tell the truth to those who want the truth, and you’ll make a living.
> 3) Tell the truth to those who want to be lied to, and you’ll go broke.
That's depressing.
Unfortunately - one can't really leave GMail until others leave as well, in that Google will still have a copy of all of our email exchange with people who still use GMail.
It doesn't matter whether Google thinks we're stupid or not - it's always thought we are suckerds, and to a great extent, we are.
Anyway, friends shouldn't let friends use GMail. Try any number of email service providers. I personally like Proton Mail (https://proton.me/mail) as far as privacy-minded webmail goes, but it doesn't have to be, nor should it be, one provider for everyone.
The message they are sending is you, as a user, do not matter to them. Only the analytics and KPIs do.
They spent lavishly on this crap without asking if anyone actually wanted it first. Now they're stuck with a bad investment and no uptake.
As usual, in the world of corporate power, you are just the inconvenient flotsam that occasionally rises to the top.
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.
(But yes, AI features are annoying and intrusive at times.)
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 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.
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.
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
I mean… this is probably true for a great number of people. Perhaps the majority and they are statistically correct to assume.
But yes, fuck Gmail pushing this shit so hard by default.
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.
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
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?
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 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.