Death by a thousand cuts.

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

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.

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.

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

Also known as Promo-Driven Culture

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

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.

As someone who hosts their own email, I dislike Gmail as much as anyone. But your issue is this:

> I go to check my email in Gmail’s web UI.

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.

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

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

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

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

Seems silly to upend your entire account. Just use a different email client. Email protocol was designed specifically so you could do that, anytime you want.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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?

> so I left

to where?

Don't worry, they are switching to mosquito based bio warfare. Gates et al released mosquitos in Florida, and that cratered the bird population which allowed pest to take over citrus trees and 75 percent of the orange crops were lost with no way to fight that pest other than the birds whose primary food source was mosquitos (true story)

Now Google wants to do it with ten or 100 times the mosquitos in California, depending on your source for how many the bird hating citrus despising cabal released in Florida a few years ago

It could be worse. They could think you were a bird and want to starve you, or think you were a bird watcher or citrus fruit grower and want to ruin your hobby and business.

Thank you for ditching them. The world is a better place every time somebody degoogles themselves. If there was a degoogled Android option, it would be great. We need the EU to mandate driver packs for AOSP for every phone instead of just for the Google Android.

They have joined super villains and tech retardery and it is good to see people standing against it. They want to be the self driving taxi bird starving dystopia makers where even your relatives pretend to talk to you via an AI intercessor. They have gone Total Recall and the admin failed to break them up when it had the opportunity so now we get the love child of the asshats from the corporation in Blade Runner and those aliens from Battle Field Earth deciding the fate of America.

I often think about leaving gmail, but it's not clear what the better option out there is, that doesn't create a bunch of pain in terms of not having good replacements for the rest of the ecosystem.

The key point here is not that they think you’re stupid but that they refuse to let you say no.

One of the Google founders (Sergei I think) read the book “nudge” and fell in love with it. What Google product managers fail to realize is that a hard nudge is called a shove. And removing the ability to say no is theft of consent. They continue to do it because it works and there’s nobody left there with enough courage to stop them.

So much like Clippy. Maybe they're trying to build enshittification in from the start.

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.

> 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 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 don't know. I used to feel this way about IDE autocompletes/suggestions. Now they are widely used, and it doesn't necessarily seem hostile. It's not that hard to imagine the same thing could happen here.

> 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?

Maybe ot is just me, but gmail users can go.. [fill the blank]. It is one thing to not value your own privacy, but not valuing that of other people is unacceptable.

Sure using the mysteriously free webmail client of that ad-company may be convenient, but the people who have to interact with you (or with whom you chose to interact) did maybe not make that choice. Forcing on them is not only rude, it should be illegal.

I am not saying you need to run your own mailserver (although I do, mailcow is great), but maybe paying for an email service that respects your another peoples privacy makes sense in a world where a single email is the key to your kingdom.

And I say that because AI that writes responses has to read your mails first. I am sure Google won't use that gathered information for any other purpose than suggesting a reply. /s

> 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.

Google has always been like this. I remember a presentation from the Google Cloud Platform team a decade ago when they smugly asserted that they'd take care of "the hard stuff" while I, their business customer, focused on ... the easy stuff?

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?

Thinking that Gmail thinks anything about you is giving them too much credit. The only reason for any of this is the desperation to juice their AI usage metrics.

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.

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).

Please Google let me buy my email and move it to my own service without any restrictions and I will be thankful. I am now in too deep to move away, from my govt licenses to banks to everything else.

Switching away from Gmail isn't possible for me, but I will keep trying, I won't give up but hopefully I would never have to realize how big a mistake this was.

I feel like I might end up on the streets if gmail goes away. Hyperbolic but it's insane how true that feels.

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

While Google Workspace for personal use is a sometimes a very painful product, at least it makes it easy to turn many of these useless Gemini features off.

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.

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.)

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.

> 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.