alt Hacker NewsGmail thinks I'm stupid, so I left
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They are probably glad for your exit since they need so much space.
Gmail has been pure shit for the past years. I started because it did not have spam, now I get endless spam on a daily basis like they're trying to kick me out on purpose
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!
I left gmail... well, not really, I was kicked out of gmail, because I am a user of noscript/basic HTML browsers and the only way to "revalidate" you account was to use a whatng cartel web engine. I recall the noscript/basic HTML interface of gmail was dropped after a while.
At the time I was paying for DNS. Then, most, if not all, DNS registrars which are not requiring a whatng cartel web engine are now gone.
The email people were careful to design the email system to work without DNS, then I went IPv[46] literals. It is stronger than SPF, since if the SMTP IP does no match the IPs in the envelope and the headers the email will be dropped.
But the "geniuses" at gmail ignore that and say that I don't have a DNS PTR record... how convenient... (My ISP does provide a PTR service... gated behind the requirement of a 'whatng cartel' web engine...).
And I don't forget about "spamhaus", a shady swiss/andoran company, which many email admins have a weird tendency to pay that for their block lists which includes ISP consumer IPs (people do not have the right to have an email server, ofc).
We are going to endup with with compuserve/AOL all over again.
> 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.
you vill use ze ai und you vill love it
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).
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.
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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.
Similar experience. Google products in general are becoming really tedious.
It feels almost like these companies have too many devs just cramming in features to justify their existence & year end performance review, rather than considering whether it is an actual improvement to the user's use case.
Gmail is also starting to really get on my nerves with their enshitified UI. Every button looks different (presumably each "owned" by someone else). It's full of popup overlays you need to click away to get to the interface. On iphone 1/3rd of my inbox real estate is currently a banner about data sharing controls?
I just want to write emails guys...
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
You can just turn all this stuff off.
and you had to be quite the hardcore google-fan to still use gmail in the year of 2000 and 26
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.
> 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’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.
> The message you’re sending is that you think I’m not capable of reading and writing my own emails.
The message they are sending is you, as a user, do not matter to them. Only the analytics and KPIs do.
They spent lavishly on this crap without asking if anyone actually wanted it first. Now they're stuck with a bad investment and no uptake.
As usual, in the world of corporate power, you are just the inconvenient flotsam that occasionally rises to the top.
Even Clippy had more respect for the user: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_Assistant
Is this a test feature? I don't see it in my gmail.
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.
Your experience is 100% unrelated.
The PM (I know her) is juicing her results, that's all.
With pressure from her bosses and ultimately the CEO to show 'usage' in AI to raise $80B of capital (debt) to build more datacenter.
Unfortunately, those are the incentives of the system.
P.S. No offense to anyone involved - I wouldn't wish the bureaucracy inside Google to make a product change upon anyone. You've used (or tried) to use their cloud products right?
I setup lieer and notmuch with an alot front end which was the first time I was able to get my Gmail inbox under control.
Unfortunately, I’m not up for learning a completely new set of keyboard shortcuts anymore and alot doesn’t provide a nice interface either, so i don’t use it much more.
But the enshittification of mail is dismaying.
it needs phone number
I'm honestly surprised they didn't reread the 2009 Gmail Autopilot April Fools Day joke in earnest.
"Lie to people who want to be lied to, and you’ll get rich."
Also known as Promo-Driven Culture
Gmail doesn’t think author is "stupid." It’s Google’s business model to sell your data as a product to advertisers; or use it to train models.
I moved to fastmail about 2 years ago. It was not a super painful process, they make it easy as possible. Also I used it as an opportunity to "reverse-whitelist" all my accounts by giving everything i use its own disposable masked address.
spam is now nonexistent in my email.
What's amusing is that you have now have parties using Ai, GPT, writing the response to the same email that was originally crafted by Ai.
Someone is having a case of the Mondays!
100%
I host my own email with my custom fronend.
I use LLM to summarize the emails I receive. Now instead of a full page full of graphics and shit, I get one-liners like "$100 charge on your Costco card at X on 1/1/2026 1:35pm"
Also when I click "spam" on a sender, a domain, or an intermediate and the message goes to spam from then on. Not like gmail who I have to click "unsubscribe" and "spam" 100 times and still the email finds it's way to my inbox.
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.
Sorry to say, but good luck, because deliverability would very likely drop after leaving Google Workspace.
(But yes, AI features are annoying and intrusive at times.)
Does anyone know uptake rates for these features? Are they actually hated? Or just hated by a vocal minority?
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.
for the past decade you should have been using gmail with all the "smart" features turned off.
Llm…………
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.
So much like Clippy.
now you have clojure. good.
> 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.