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Comment by avazhi | Hacker News Reader

Not a fan of Google but I always find Gmail criticisms so weird.

Like, what does this guy even mean about the algorithm sorting his inbox? Legit what the fuck is he talking about? Non junk mail goes to my inbox. Spam goes to spam. What am I missing?

And speaking of spam, I have a bunch of proton mail accounts and outlook accounts and iCloud mail accounts and Gmail’s spam filter is easily the best. Like, it’s not even close. Protonmail is nearly as bad as outlook at dealing with spam. It’s impossible to overstate how bad both of them are at filtering spam vs Gmail.

I legit feel like I’m either being actively gaslit or I’m genuinely missing something big here.

As for search alternatives, I’d love to use Kagi full time but the cost is just unreasonably high for now IMO.

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Google had a feature in gmail for a long time that automatically sorts your email into categories like Promotions, Social, Updates, Forums, etc. It was automated and fairly effective imo. If you try to disable the 'smart' features they will then disable this categorization retroactively and dump thousands of emails in your inbox and then nag you about turning it back on.

I’ve clearly had it turned off for years(?) and I’ve never had it nag about it.

You may have turned this feature off (like I did) but by default Gmail sorts your emails into categories like Promotions, Social, Updates...

it's just someone who thinks degoogling himself has somehow elevated his entire existence to the sky

I'm personally not so attached to this idea of Google being evil so I don't really get this at all

> Like, what does this guy even mean about the algorithm sorting his inbox? Legit what the fuck is he talking about?

Gmail has a feature that can break your inbox into a priority section and an everything else section. You have to put in some work to flag and unflag messages based on what you think is important. It's not perfect but with some training it's helpful.

Some people turn it on and expect it to read their minds about everything or think they can ignore the everything else section.

You can just turn it back off. You don't have to leave Gmail.

> And speaking of spam, I have a bunch of proton mail accounts and outlook accounts and iCloud mail accounts and Gmail’s spam filter is easily the best.

Agree. This person's reduced spam experience was due to the new e-mail address and being disciplined about not signing up for a million things on it, not because Proton is better.

Google takes money to bypass their spam filters. They call those ads.

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