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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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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. :-)

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.

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.

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".

> 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.

It looks like you are writing an email. Would you like some help with that?

Seems somewhat familiar from somewhere…

I got a new Samsung phone a few months ago (my last phone was showing signs of dying soon, and I'd promised to never touch Xiaomi again). It took a while to convince the two competing sets of GenAI features (Gemini and Bixby, and related features) that if I wanted their help I'd come calling, and until then they should sod off and leave me to do things myself.

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.

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'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.

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.

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.

> 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?

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.

Overly aggrieved style of writing. There's some prompts in Gmail to use AI. These are supposedly indictments of the author's writing or intellect? Anyway, the setting is in General and then Cmd-F "smart" and turn everything off.

Instead of promoting LLMs to write emails and then using LLMs to summarize emails, we could just write succinctly to each other.

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?

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.

Proton Mail is excellent as is their password manager and VPN.

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

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.

use IMAP and your fav. e-mail client. Gmail's UI has sucked for ages. Totally unusable for pro users.

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

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 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.

> I focus the message box to draft a reply, but there’s already one there. It was also generated by the language model. I delete it, replacing it with my own.

The really, really scary thing is how uncommon this approach is. I think.

My assumption is that most people roll with automated pre-written reply. Maybe tweaking a few things here and there, but ultimately preferring the all-too-convenient trade-off of the robots having written something close enough to what they wanted to say, using "better" words. Even when what they would have written themselves would have had some personality, even if it was their own flawed human one.

For the record, I am 100% with you on your approach (on the odd occasion that I must use gmail).

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 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.

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.

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 don't receive any of those prompts in Gmail. Perhaps because I said no when that popup for "integrate Gemini into Gmail" happened months ago?

    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.

> Afterward, I go to compose a new message. A colorful animation steals my focus for a second highlighting a new “help me write” button. I ignore it and move on to filling in the recipients and subject line.

Does it do this animation every time you try to compose a new message, or is it just the first time you are given the button?

(I couldn't simply look at my own gmail to see, because I tried that but mine does not have it. I'm guessing it is either something they are gradually rolling out or it is something only for people who are paying for Google services).

I have a friend with dyslexia and he has always agonised over writing email. At work he would often get me to check important emails for him.

Using AI allows him to feel a lot more confident in what he is writing, particularly when I suggested he tell the LLM tone (friendly and professional) he was wanting.

A gmail expat, I've been over at posteo for about a decade. Couldn't imagine a reason to go back for my personal account.

I've used gmail for corpo email since, but I don't have a choice there.

Yeah none of this is helpful. Even writing in Google docs is inundated with AI in your face features I don't need 99% of the time.

I don't mind the "make this clearer" suggestions in email writing, sometimes that does help me. As long as it stays out of my way like a spell checker, and is optional /opt in.

I'll never, ever forgive Google for killing the "Basic HTML View" client mode for Gmail.

gmail is the best and worst email system on earth

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"

This is the header bar I see every day in Gmail <https://imgur.com/a/QCUP43o>. The color behind the Google logo is incorrect. I can name about 50 similar UI issues. Google's lack of attention to detail is almost impressive.

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.

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...

Making a 10 min email/work doc used to take far longer than 10 mins. Now it takes far less. This breaks the built-in guard against wasting people’s time.

I wonder if a minor UI change might help a bit: make it normal to show “approx 15 min read” in the email/whatever interface.

Just some sort of “this is the baseline amount of work you’re asking of the recipient.”

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.

One of the most frustrating parts about Google's approach to AI in general is their project manager-y directive from on-high, that any Google product needs to adopt all Google's AI tools, wherever possible, and will be ranked on how deeply the integration goes.

In the margins: the user.

I still use gmail, and so far only a few spam messages have gone through. They really built a solid system, but the web ui is just not a good experience, so thank god for thunderbird too.

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.

> but this is the first time I’ve experienced software that feels like it’s actively trying to be disrespectful

It sounds like they use plenty of software so they must be incredibly lucky, picky, or both.

I find it odd how so many tech involved people here use gmail - are privacy concerns not a concern for them?

I moved to mailbox.org years ago. Pay a few pounds a year for private email with webtools and drive and don't have google snooping my emails and sending me targeted ads.

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.

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?

The message they're trying to send is not "we think you're stupid" so much as "we know you hate this, let us make it easier."

The problem is that they don't offer a way for you to say "no, thank you, I'll write my own emails", because they are dumping so much money into this thing and if people don't want to use it they can't justify feeding the token machine.

You can turn a lot of this stuff off by having a Google Cloud account and using their "business-class" product, which gives you the power to turn off these features (most of them, anyway) for your "employees". I'm already doing that because I use Google for a bunch of stuff, but if I wasn't, I might switch away from Gmail as well.

I 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.

Very happy to have mostly de-Googled, I don't miss the AI-forward product decisions. I only use Google now for occasional searches and interacting with other Google users (e.g. Docs).

They are probably glad for your exit since they need so much space.

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).

Nothing changed for me. I do not really recognize this tab suggestion and besides that, i do not see anything has changed.

> “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".

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.

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.

At some point it will be Gmail talking to itself.

Llm…………

You can just turn all this stuff off.

Someone is having a case of the Mondays!

> 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.

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.

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.

and you had to be quite the hardcore google-fan to still use gmail in the year of 2000 and 26

> 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.

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.

100%

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.

> so I left

to where?

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.

Death by a thousand cuts.

I'm honestly surprised they didn't reread the 2009 Gmail Autopilot April Fools Day joke in earnest.

It’s interesting to me that “gives all my private correspondence to federal police without a warrant or judicial oversight” isn’t enough to get people to quit gmail, but “offers to write my email replies for me” is.

Adults shouldn’t use gmail. I think less of people who do.

I 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.

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.

for the past decade you should have been using gmail with all the "smart" features turned off.

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.

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

Also known as Promo-Driven Culture

> 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.

> 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.

So much like Clippy.

I am also considering leaving Gmail over the blue squiggly lines trying to tell me how to "improve" my phrasing.

I like the nuance my words convey, Google.

I don't need to sound like an LLM with no sense of personality. My phrasing is chosen very deliberately to draw a very precise picture. I don't appreciate you trying to blur it.

What I fucking hate more than anything else is this new nonsense about me approaching the 15 GB limit and then when I want to clean things up, it has zero tools that make any sense. Like just let me sort all of my messages with the largest sized messages on top. Instead it gives me some random selection of messages of varying sizes, most less than 1 MB. You cannot sort it in anyway. Horrible. Horrible I am so angry.

Google, if you’re listening, the only thing I need in the cleanup tool is a sort all mails by size option. That’s it. Just put the biggest one on top and sort down from there.

> 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.

> I think we’re all used to user-hostile software these days, but this is the first time I’ve experienced software that feels like it’s actively trying to be disrespectful.

Always wild to hear people say stuff like this. First, all user-hostility is clearly disrespectful by definition. Second, almost all software, even the free stuff, is insanely user-hostile. We are all so completely frog-boiled on this it's not even funny. Yes, even people in tech and maybe especially people in tech.

Everyone reading this has probably used 10 applications today that are completely ignoring instructions to disable updates/telemetry if they even bothered to lie to you that this is possible. IOS has years-old "bugs" where turning off voice control isn't actually possible, official docs are gas-lighting you, and the settings are just ignored.. so people just deal with paused music that inconsistently triggers on 1/5 of your sneezes or coughs and get used to it. Spotify performance/ux/sanity has been completely degraded for months now. Web-browsers routinely force updates to require multi-gig downloads of AI models, and before that, they had on-and-off regressions in basic stuff like copy/paste for multiple years. Your popup-blocker that helps you to stay sane feels fine about popping up some shit that tells you how many pop-ups it freaking blocked. This is just my last 10 minutes. You can dig into any one of these problems, lose 45m on some janky fix, and also know for sure that you'll need to spend the same effort on some related goddamned problem less than a week later.

Besides the "ads for paying customers" type of stuff, this drip-drip of millions and millions of little points of persistent friction never stops. You think you broke it or you are going crazy until you deep-dive the bug reports or the reddit threads and realize it's all gas-lighting, and someone has made a choice. If the choice wasn't about disrespectful surveillance, auto-updates, or profit-maxxing enshittification then it's a greenhorn developer refactoring something for devx or aesthetics over UX, and the breakage didn't even happen in service of a real feature.

You try to freeze the apps with snap or containers or whatever for some stability hoping to GTFO the fix-it-again treadmill. You assert proudly that "Computers work for me, I don't work for them!" It's smoother for a while but there's always something. A phone-home with a suddenly bad endpoint, a missing remote tag/version gets yanked, or the operating system itself will betray you with yet-another iteration of unnecessary path-changing nonsense that breaks everything anyway.

Although they are opposites in every other way, Linus and Bezos may be the last living bosses that valued stability, backwards compatibility, and not fucking up shit that works fine. When they are gone god help us all.

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

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

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

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

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

I don’t understand. Do the people generating ‘content’ with LLMs themselves enjoy pissing away their own time ingesting the output they’re asking an LLM to produce?

For all the amazing creative work carefully (or not) crafted by humans directly, you’d rather have the derived token sausage?

Writing with intent to deceive a human, and otherwise generating ‘art’ with models is the laziest application thereof, and I’d argue it’s unethical. If you generate something and present it to me as your own work, worthy of direct human consumption and thus, my finite human heartbeats, I instantly have a problem with you.

Email in perfuckingticular: if your actual reply is “yep, meet you there!” And you ask the LLM to expand it and bloat it in some way, what’s the justification?

I understand that this is frustrating for people who mostly write thoughtful emails. But personally I use gmail for exactly the following things: account recovery, system notifications, and b2b email threads. For the latter, I really couldn't care less about form or shape. It's a tool to an end, to get a point across. I found the auto writing stuff pretty useless so far (suggestions change the intended tone or even meaning of the email) but summaries are very useful to get a grip what happened in a larger thread which I should only know the gist of anyway.

I might be in the minority but to me email is an annoying requirement to reach out to people, and that is not due to the AI tools, it's due to: thread management, the horrible noise of unasked for newsletter, and system messages and updates I theoretically do care about but that are just inconsistently formatted and badly listed. I welcome AI giving me a better overview over what's going on than what I myself have.