alt Hacker NewsGmail thinks I'm stupid, so I left
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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.
A big question about this push for AI/LLM features in products, and I think very related to public sentiment on AI, is that if these features were so desirable and useful why do they need to be so forcefully promoted?
If these features were so useful, the internet would be full of articles and viral videos about how to turn them on and use them.
Instead, every single software service you sign in to now has to stop you with popups, chat windows, and sparkle animations to show you all of the shiny new AI features they have added, like they're all Microsoft trying to convince you to switch your browser to Edge.
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!
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 can heartily recommend going into your Google settings and disabling the global "smart features" option. It removes a huge amount of crap all at once.
For GMail, go to Settings -> General (https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/#settings/general) and scroll down to "Smart features" and disable that.
Then go to the next option, "Google Workspace smart features" and disable them across your entire workspace with 1 or 2 more toggles.
Finally, just switch to Fastmail or something. :-)
Gmail is one of the shoddiest of the ultra-cheap email providers. If you use Gmail, a significant number of messages will disappear. They don't go to junk, they just disappear. Gmail will reject messages for obscure technical reasons. They recently decided that they would no longer accept messages signed with 1024 bit RSA DKIM. So, with no public announcement they just turned on the restriction. I found out about this from a random Mastodon poster who wasn't really sure what was going on. The error message returned to the sender gave no indication at all.
Gmail is the email provider for people that like to claim they never got the email. Google has somehow made the most reliable messaging medium, unreliable.
It is obvious that Google simply doesn't care about email. So it makes perfect sense for them to use Gmail to promote something that they do care about.
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.
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.
Exactly the same problem manifests itself in Google Docs.
Hit RETURN. New paragraph. Begin considering what you will write. Prompt pops up: “Help me write.” Every time.
It’s incredibly distracting and turning it off is hard wired into disabling about 1000 other features.
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.
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.
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.
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'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.
My interpretation leans towards: Gmail Thinks I'm Lazy.
LLMs have made one thing clear: intellectual laziness is even more pervasive than we previously thought, even among "knowledge workers".
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)
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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?
I use Fastmail for personal email, but my org is a Google shop. If you have "smart features and personalization" turned off it doesn't even try with AI tools, and I toggled that years ago to get it to stop doing the smart category stuff. The horrifying thing as they pile on "AI" features lately is realizing that most of my coworkers have a totally different email experience.
I don't see any of those (horribly-sounding) AI "helpers" when I read or write messages in gmail. I tried it again just now, to make sure that nothing had changed since yesterday. I do remember clicking through some suggested "feature improvements" a while ago and saying "No" to all of them. Can't really remember what it was though. Can it be that the author has some option enabled in settings somewhere which allows this? Or is this something GMail is (forcibly) gradually rolling out? If so, shudder.
EditUpdate: After reading another comment, this must have been a bunch of "smart features" which gmail suggested a while ago. I just, as I said, refused all of them. So they're available in Settings somewhere. Find, turn off.
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.
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.
I turned off "smart features" in the setting months ago, and I've never seen any of the things the author complains about.
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.
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.
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.
LinkedIn (the company not the other users) thinks I'm stupid, so I also left 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.
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?
You can turn off the "smart" features in the settings page for gmail. I did this and find it to be much more usable!
I think more and more about just moving back to Thunderbird client. Not ready though to give up on my google account, the calendar is too good.
I haven’t seen the Gmail web UI in perhaps 15 years or so. I’ve been using it with various email clients and it works just fine.
The issues the author describes are issues with Gmail’s web interface, not with the email service itself.
I'll never, ever forgive Google for killing the "Basic HTML View" client mode for Gmail.
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.
Long time protonmail subscriber and reasonably happy, but them not allowing SMTP access (other than through proton bridge which is a GUI app - workaround: https://ndo.dev/blog/headless_protonbridge) kind of sucks, and their search functionality is also not great.
Debating moving over to Fastmail as well
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?
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 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.
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).
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.
Gmail’s summaries are both intrusive and poor quality. They actively make the email experience worse.
This is all a solution looking for a problem, pretending that people don’t have time to read or write their own email.
With both Google search and email Google is willing to replace reality with uncertain pseudo-reality. I find it extraordinary.
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 probably accept about 50% of its suggestions for improvements.
Sometimes it finds "misspellings" where I wrote a correctly spelled word but not the one I intended, because it understands context. Sometimes it legitimately makes the sentence clearer.
And sometimes its suggestion turns the message from a warm and friendly email into a cold strictly-business email. Those are the ones I usually ignore.
I 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 don't get it.
Just don't use the Gmail interface. Use your own mail reader.
Don't conflate "Gmail the UI" with "Gmail the mail provider".
Having said this - I never used Gmail for anything serious - I had my own domain + mail etc since before Gmail existed, and the reason was I got tired of "free" tools making my life miserable.
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?
Looking for your alternative?
Let me give you some (non financially motivated) praise for Fastmail.
It has everything Gmail has - even app passwords, hide my email, and ios integration. The only criticism is the calendar doesn’t autocomplete addresses so that’s a bit more typing than I would like. But everything you do in Fastmail is instant. They live up to the name!
Once you try it and go back, you’ll be shocked - Gmail makes you stare at its logo for multiple seconds while it shrugs and eventually loads.. then takes over the top of your inbox with “try our new AI features!” which never remembers that you dismissed it 50 times in a row. Everything in gmail is SO slow, while Fastmail doesn’t even bother with animations. No animations will confuse you until you settle in and realise that yes, things can be nice.
Fastmail data migration brought across my 22 years of emails over the course of about 30 hours with zero help from me. Search on Fastmail finds everything - even back to when you could only get Gmail with a friend code. There’s nothing left on the other side, it’s all here with me.
Going back to my brand new startup inbox (G Suite) gives me the same feelings I get wandering a castle ruin.