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Comment by merelysounds | Hacker News Reader

Anecdotally, I don’t see any of this. I have all “smart” features in gmail turned off; there is an option like this in the settings.

Google’s Help: https://support.google.com/mail/answer/15604322

Also relevant:

> By default, smart feature settings are off if you live in: The European Economic Area, Japan, Switzerland, United Kingdom

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This. You can disable all smart features (which includes things like mail categories, AI auto-complete, and most things that look at your emails).

Gear -> All Settings -> General tab (default) -> Smart features: Turn on smart features in Gmail, Chat, and Meet

Linked help page: https://support.google.com/mail/answer/15604322

I really wished they would also let you disable those very annoying modal popups announcing yet-another-chatbot-integration twice a week: My company is already paying for your product, just let me do my work ffs...

> You can disable all smart features

For how long?

You don't own the platform. Google PMs may decide to roll it out to everyone at some point to hit numbers.

And this is generically true and always has been about every aspect of GMail?

What would you suggest people do. Self-host?

I'm just trying to understand why you posted this. It's generically true. Any company can change anything at any point. May as well just pack it up boys.

> I'm just trying to understand why you posted this. It's generically true. Any company can change anything at any point. May as well just pack it up boys.

Yes, any SaaS can change any feature at any time. Some companies have different motives though. We're not paying for GMail. When customers pay a monthly subscription and can cancel at any time, you usually want to keep them happy.

The internal motives are also different. Are employees promoted for just launching stuff? Are they running out of helpful features to launch?

The point is to say that it’s bad and Google specifically can’t be trusted. It’s good to express disapproval of unethical business practices.

You can't self-host these days -- your emails will get stuck in every kind of spam filter there is, and you'll always have cause to wonder if your emails are received by their intended recipients, or lost to the abyss.

You've got to use either Gmail, Microsoft, Protonmail, etc. I don't love them, but Proton is probably the best of a bad bunch.

> You can't self-host these days -- your emails will get stuck in every kind of spam filter there is, and you'll always have cause to wonder if your emails are received by their intended recipients, or lost to the abyss.

this is not true unless you end up on an IP previously abused

if you don't want to take on the risk at all, there's email services for pennies / thousand emails

> if you don't want to take on the risk at all, there's email services for pennies / thousand emails

I'm seriously interested. Which ones would you recommend? Are they reliable?

Migadu, Fastmail, Protonmail, Zoho, Tutanota

These have all been running for many years and work fine, hell there's even the meme addresses at cock.li which has been running for over 10 years.

You don't need to be on a gmail account for reliable email.

I've had good luck with Contabo IPs

I do self host. The only problem I have is with MS, almost always with hotmail addresses.

> And this is generically true and always has been about every aspect of GMail?

In principle, but look at all the ways Gmail bends over backwards to keep ancient UI preferences working. You can configure it for different inbox presentations, different densities, snippets or not, images displayed or not, UI icons or text, you can disable and enable threading, you can put chat and meet on one side or not, you can have keyboard shortcuts or not, you can remap all the keyboard shortcuts if you use them, etc etc etc.

Well, they're off by default in the countries mentioned in the top-level comment because they're legally required to be opt-in there (the implementation rather than the feature of course, but it couldn't really be otherwise).

I suppose, to your point, Google doesn't have to make it optional in other countries... But that discrepancy would seem to have a lot of downside (maintenance, optics, docs) for little upside (...force adoption against the will of users who would go out of their way to opt out of they could?).

How many would turn them on if they defaulted to "Off"? Probably not enough to justify the development cost.

True but that is a function of ignorance too. There are plenty of good features in Gmail that are off by default, like undo / delayed send and keyboard shortcuts.

"Enable delay send - Allows you to undo sending emails for 5 minutes", I'd argue that a lot of people would enable that pretty fast.

Keyboard shortcuts probably would work like I'd expect, people like me would go "Hell no, no keyboard shortcuts in browser application EVER", and power users would opt into that in an instant.

Allow you to undo sending for 5 minutes means email delivery is delayed by 5 minutes.

It doesn't have to be 5 minutes. It could be 15 seconds. I've used that feature (in Fastmail), and find it very valuable.

I'm confused. Doesn't gmail offer an 'undo' for send by default ? At least for the last 5 years ? It's in General settings "Undo Send" and can be set up to 30 seconds ?

And before that it was under the Labs experimental features, I think I enabled it in the late 2000s.

This is often the case with Google products because the A/B testing is rampant.

I would really love it if there was a "smart setting" (or a dumb setting) to prevent people from sending me their drip marketing spam. The spam filtering in my personal Gmail is adequate, if not perfect (I really don't understand how the constant life insurance spam is getting through). But my main client uses Google Workspace or GSuite or whatever it is called these days, and my inbox for that email features a constant barrage of drip campaign garbage.

Are Google's incentives misaligned in some way here? It's not like the heuristics are particularly difficult for this kind of email. Some of it even has unsubscribe links (I didn't subscribe), or, "If you don't want to hear from me again, just let me know", etc.

Some of it even has unsubscribe links (I didn't subscribe), or, "If you don't want to hear from me again, just let me know", etc.

I don't know if this counts as "drip marketing" (a new term to me), but just this week Apple spammed me with some Apple Card offer for Hertz car rentals.

No way to unsubscribe. No link. No mention of unsubscribing at all. And on the Apple Card web site, no way to turn off marketing emails.

I wish you could still report these spam's to the FTC.

I run my email via imap and haven't seen GMail web UI for at least 15 years. Apple does some minor changes to Mail app but generally they follow "if it ain't broke don't fix it" motto, and I really appreciate that. Besides, I have email from Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, and FastMail in the same app, and I really appreciate that all email for me looks the same.

Good for you. 9999 out of 10,000 people don't know what a "gmail web UI" is, or even that there's something called email that is separate from the gmail web interface.

> web interface.

Bold of you to think they know what is this.

I have seen enough people who wholeheartedly though the things in their phone stays in it and you lose access to them if you move to another phone.

You didn't read the post you responded to.

The above poster is not talking to end users about the web interface. The poster is talking to you. About the fact that end users don't separate the interface from the thing.

You are making the same argument with the same language to someone that made the same point.

True, and 10-20 years ago this seemed like a transitional issue: the world of technology was new and humanity needed time to adapt. Today I feel like some of this should be taught at school. Stuff like what is a browser, what is TLS, what are cookies, what is an email, what is phishing, etc. I know schools used to teach people Excel, Word and other office programs. Maybe they still do, and web should be a part of that curriculum.

Anecdotally, most of the non-tech-savvy people in my life use gmail via Apple's Mail app on their phone or iPad.

Same. I know so many people who just use Apple Mail and don’t even know that there is or why they would use the gmail app.

Pretty sure most people access their mail on their phone or tablet these days, either using a service-specific app, or a generic app like Apple Mail. I wouldn't be surprised in the least if many Gmail users had never used the web interface at all.

I turned on Fastmail and all the AI bullshit went away for good. No regrets.

Very happy with fastmail. It's amazing how much better the user experience (and speed performance!) is.

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