Gmail thinks I'm stupid, so I left

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.

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.

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

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. :-)

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.

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.

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.

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 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".

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 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 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 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.

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.

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.

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?

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 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?

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.

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?

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

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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

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 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).

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.

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.

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.”

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.

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 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).