Bye Bye Gmail

> My email is now being hosted by Microsoft, [...] Then I guess it's off to Switzerland ( https://proton.me/about );

I am all for moving away from Gmail, but I think this is completely the wrong way to do it. Why go through the hassle of changing your @gmail for @microsoft (or whatever it is?), already thinking about moving to @proton.me in the future?

Get your own domain, and then you won't depend on the service provider anymore. Try Proton, or Fastmail, or Migadu, whatever you want. Once you own your domain, you can change every year while keeping the same email address (e.g. [email protected])!

Note: I won't accept "it's too hard to setup a domain" from someone who spent more time writing a blog post than it would take to learn how to do it.

Just disabled the "Smart features" setting in Gmail. Disabling this feature force-disables these other settings:

- Grammar

- Spelling

- Auto-correct

Pretty dark UX to force users into an all AI or nothing situation.

PS1: Yes, I've paid for Google One for years and I'm not just a free user.

PS2: Yes, these features are entirely possible to provide without training on your specific user data.

Since we're all posting about our favourite email provider, Purelymail has been one of my best discoveries of the last year or so. Ten dollars a year (though it's expected that price will go up) for as many mailboxes as you like. There's a webmail too in case you don't want your own IMAP client. I migrated every email I had (except an unmigrateable @gmail.com) to Purelymail over Christmas and I couldn't be happier.

I have more than 20 years of email in my gmail account. How do I even start migrating?

And even if I migrate, I will need to keep my address alive and forwarding to my new address at least for a few years. So no privacy gains there either.

Does anyone have concrete advice as to how to make the transition?

"My email is now being hosted by Microsoft..."

Out of the pan, into the fire.

my recommendation: i've been happily using fastmail for years.

I moved my custom domain from google workspace to fastmail a few years ago and didn't look back. Very happy with that decision.

The only two downsides:

1. A few people have reported my emails from fastmail (calendar invites mostly) going to their spam folder. Not enough reports so I'm not worried.

2. Google won't let me sign in and create / edit /comment in google docs with my custom email hosted at fastmail so I have to have a [email protected] account just to use free google docs to collaborate with people who only send me google docs.

Overall I think AI features are going to be great but give me the ability to pick and choose which I enable / disable and we should be good. If not then I agree with OP - Bye Bye Gmail.

oh, and don't read my emails and protect my privacy google! - no? Ok bye bye!

> I tried turning off Smart Features and oh my, that's not usable.

Why? What did it do?

This is the problem. Overload. It is not a google problem. If you get 200 emails - even without AI - just by using Thunderbird or k9mail (android) it will be a problem.

edit: https://support.google.com/mail/answer/15604322?hl=en

I cannot find that "Messages and attachments might be reviewed by humans, so don't share any sensitive or confidential information."

anywhere.

Of course, there is nothing wrong about changing the provider. Variety is good.

I've been using Fastmail for several years now, I remember when I first said something about it on here I got a negative response about how Fastmail doesn't do something correctly or something, and now most of the comment replies are praising Fastmail. I still like it, it's just interesting how fickle things are here.

> My email is now being hosted by Microsoft, so hopefully will be free of the outages

Ironically Microsoft just had an outage a couple of days ago.

OK, while I briefly have a bit of your attention: what would you advise to use instead? What I need:

* Server-side filters.

* Tags. No, not folders. Many of my emails have 2-3 tags, some have 4-5. I wonder if it can even map to IMAP4; I see a few ways to model it.

* Good deliverability.

* Reasonable spam protection.

* Not hugely expensive. Ideally near-free, or self-hosted.

What are some options?

I have had gmail for decades.

The best thing I did recently was turn off the smart features, add a bunch of filters, and unsubscribe from stuff I was no longer interested in.

It was initially a shock to see so many emails I hadn't cared for, but an hour of curation, and it has been a delight ever since.

Awhile ago when I logged in to my gmail account I was asked if I wanted to try AI summaries, I clicked "no" and nothing has changed in my user experience in either the web interface or mobile apps. It also told me I could that I could enable or disable AI features with the Gemini icon next to the settings icon, which it looks like I can still do, at least in the web interface. Am I missing something?

Being "an early adopter" is not proof of anything other than being an early adopter.

Both me and partner switching to Infomaniak (also Swiss), can recommend. Not E2E encrypted, but kMail is more usable than ProtonMail (also a lot cheaper on all levels).

Been using ProtonMail for 5 years but so annoying I can't propely search my emails because of the encryption, can't use standard IMAP without a proprietary connector, and their Drives/Docs suite is missing a lot of features.

Single best thing I've done to get control over my public email:

* add a filter that moves all email with "unsubscribe" into an "unsubscribe" folder

combined with fastmail spam filtering, my inbox actually became usable again instantly...

https://mako.cc/copyrighteous/google-has-most-of-my-email-be...

Sure.

Google Has Most of My Email Because It Has All of Yours

I’ve migrated my main mail account (gmail) to a custom domain on apple’s icloud.

No regrets (since I am a mac & iphone user).

Plus, I can have a email per website, without exposing my main address.

Been having a custom domain on Proton for almost 10 years now. No issues and I'm happy my Google sceptisism is now paying dividends

I have been looking into options too. One option that seemed attractive was called Zoho mail. Any experiences from that?

Is it easy and advisable to host your own email server on vps?

#di_day #ccc ;)

It would have been nicer if this was about a general Google boycott in general, but this will do too.

I'm very happy with MimeStream. I get gmail, without the UX of gmail, and something that I can command-tab into, instead of a browser window.

Recently I was surprised to see a Google Gemini summary at the top of my email on my phone. A day or two later this appeared in my web client as well. Look, I love our new overlords (for the record m'lords I nearly always use please and thank you. I was an early adopter. I still am a frequent user..I mean someone who has all the answers and blows smoke up my ass..perfect right!

Despite that, it appears it's not good for me (https://www.media.mit.edu/publications/your-brain-on-chatgpt...) It's great, it's easy, makes me feel good in the moment..of course it's bad for me!

Here's the thing. I like to read things from my friends that they have taken the time to write. I personally hate texting. All the nuance is gone. Often the humor. Sad. Makes me want to have a beer with you...eye contact...blech. The LAST thing I want is a summary...at the top of the email...highlighted..that I CANNOT turn off.

I tried to turn it off. I can. It's under `Gmail -> Settings -> General -> Smart Features (checkbox)`. BUT..the AI summaries is now grouped with the Smart Tabs.

For those of you who do not use Gmail Smart Tabs, Smart Tabs (officially the Tabbed Inbox) have been part of Gmail since 2013; well actually the technology behind them—Smart Labels—actually debuted two years earlier. (Thank you Gemini, yes I DO truly love you. Tell me again about the comparisons of Stephen Miller and Heinrich Himmler's tactics please?)

Smart Tabs automatically sort my incoming flood of solicited commercial email (cue laughter from those who know my first start-up) into five buckets:

* Primary: Email from you. * Promotions: K&L Wine Merchants at the top of the list. * Social: Hi Andrew on Facebook (that I only log into from Firefox running on a VM). * Update: Actual transactional emails from companies. * Forums: The Information at the top of the list (a newsletter I'd like to read but don't want to make the time justify paying for the content).

I tried turning off Smart Features and oh my, that's not usable. So I lived with the AI summary at the top. For a week. Then this morning, I saw several messages in my Primary tab that normally get sorted into Promotions, Social, Updates or Forums. This is not unheard of; sometimes a company uses a new incoming address or something and stuff gets put in the wrong bucket.

But THIS time, I got a popup that says I must "Share" this message with Google and links to the Privacy Policy and Google Terms of Service. And an explicit sentence: "Messages and attachments might be reviewed by humans, so don't share any sensitive or confidential information."

I'm not naive. I'm an early adopter, my email address includes my name and no numbers. I AM a direct marketer. From the get-go, having Google read my email in order to provide targeted advertising was part of the deal. I was fine with that.

BUT...now...what they are saying is that...we are going to use your email to train our LLMs. I'm not okay with that. That knowledge of my way of writing, my personal details, my confidential commercial information is NOT okay to use to train your models. 'Cause I expect mistakes will be made and more information will reside in the model than those at Google (or FB, MSFT etc) intended. And I'm not really up for assuming that risk.

So...goodbye Gmail. It's been great. Really great. I'm sure I'll miss you. Bye.

My email is now being hosted by Microsoft, so hopefully will be free of the outages and limits some of you have experienced with that email in the past. There it will reside until I cannot turn off MSFT's ability to read my email. Then I guess it's off to Switzerland ( [https://proton.me/about](https://proton.me/about) ); my email can be with my gold. JK.

Tom

p.s. why thank you Gemini for reformatting that for me into a clean, engaging markdown blog post. Yes, I do agree this is a sharp, timely take on the "AI-ification" of tools we use every day. I love you. Kill me last?