alt Hacker NewsGmail thinks I'm stupid, so I left
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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.
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.
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 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.
> 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 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.
use IMAP and your fav. e-mail client. Gmail's UI has sucked for ages. Totally unusable for pro users.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
> “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".
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...
Nothing changed for me. I do not really recognize this tab suggestion and besides that, i do not see anything has changed.
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.
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.
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).
> 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.
Someone is having a case of the Mondays!
You can just turn all this stuff 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.
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.
Llm…………
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.
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.
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.
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.
100%
I'm honestly surprised they didn't reread the 2009 Gmail Autopilot April Fools Day joke in earnest.
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’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.
"Lie to people who want to be lied to, and you’ll get rich."
Also known as Promo-Driven Culture
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.
> 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.)
for the past decade you should have been using gmail with all the "smart" features turned off.
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.