Gmail thinks I'm stupid, so I left

When I migrated from Gmail to Fastmail years ago, I thought Fastmail felt... less featureful.

When I rarely visit my abandoned Gmail, I can't believe I put up with the clunkiness.

Lean software stands the test of time.

Fastmail hasn't had a noteworthy UI change ever.

Minor annoyances:

  - Clicking an iPhone notification opens the app, but never brings me to the actual email
  - It is difficult to unfold the full extended header section on iPhone
  - ...I can't think of more...

I might switch away for a solution that is more affordable when hosting emails for many family members and organisations. But for a handful, I really can't recommend it enough.

I'm not talking about manually tagging, setting up, and filtering all incoming email before my inbox can self-organize. I mean automatically. Only show me the true primary items in my inbox from the jump. Everything else can wait.

In the absence of this feature my inbox becomes a torrent of incoming mail that is far harder to manage and prioritize. I keep my inbox at "zero" and I can completely understand why other people give up and let their inbox be overrun. This feature is essential for me.

dunno ok maybe I'll try fastmail

I have no alternatives to suggest besides doing your own email. It's way better than anything commercial, works the way you want it, and most importantly nowadays, it's not used to train a commercial AI.

I also find the interface better. I was also expecting Google to have resources for optimizing details, that a small company wouldn't get around to.

Fastmail also lets you e-mail a real person for help and they usually take it very seriously - e.g, they go look at logs before following up.

[0] https://proton.me/blog/proton-mail-connect-gmail

  > Looking for your alternative? Let me give you some (non financially motivated) praise for Fastmail.

Fastmail handles the same things with aplomb and has much better screen real estate usage, for one.

The only thing I kind of want with Fastmail is if it had some EU-based datacenter.

Then again I also moved from gmail to mailbox.org and am a happy camper since. I don't know if we are a majority but I find myself cutting all ties with google services (youtube premium, drive, gemini etc.) as they try to force unwanted features and workflows in my daily life.

[1] https://comail.at

I migrated from Gmail a few years ago. Setting up your own domain is peanuts. Migrating all your mail from Gmail is literally just clicking some buttons in the UI and then it all happens in the background. The interface is fast, robust, and can be configured to have pleasant early '00s levels of contrast.

Ah, the standard Silicon Valley permission request format:

"Would you like us to invade your privacy: 'Yes' Or 'Ask me again later'".

It's like being propositioned by a nutcase who won't take no for an answer.... the ethics and legality of which are obvious for all to see.

Something I've done and which has been a big quality of life improvement is to set up a folder with 30 day retention, then an email rule to move any emails with `+` or apple relay there. Those are legitimate emails I want to read such as online order status, but I don't need them in my every day email.

Did you meet that issue?

You can add multiple domains to your account without making it a feel like an enterprise.

All the features relating to the aliases is available on the ios app. One doesn’t need to jump between the web and the app to do basic things.

It was astounding just how quick it was, which really shows you how little of a damn they seem to give about their users. That's especially weird, given that they dogfood their own products.

I switched my domain over to fastmail and have been using it for the past hour and seems promising. The interaction with the company is nice too and they seem very much “do one thing well” and doesn’t make me feel scummy like every time I interact with google’s products.

Interestingly I didn’t realize how slow gmail was until switching. Not just the web ui. I use the ios mail app and gmail didn’t support push, only fetch. And the app is 17.8MB (compared to gmail’s 716.7MB). Crazy that it’s 40x smaller.

My theory is that people are fundamentally averse to the thought and effort it takes to write a good quality email. Then there’s probably some underlying belief that more volume shows more effort, which people will perceive positively. And finally, there's the worry that if you write the email yourself, you might make some embarrassing wording, grammar, or spelling mistake.

You can imagine this spread into dating as well, so you just have sex efficiently to optimize the breeding and hedonism.

At some point the protocol of expanding and then compacting with AI will also be removed to optimize the unneeded inference and people will again talk to each other but using the caveman language, stripped away from centuries of culture.

For example, a tenant emails me about some issue relating to a specific property. It can go through my leases, find the right one, check other emails to see I ordered a new appliance to that specific address, track shipping/install, all that, then reply appropriately.

The weird thing is, if I commented on a channel and they sent me an AI-generated reply, I'd just hate them forever.

Personally, when I message people I respect I either don't use AI or ask it "please fix typos only", but if it's someone I don't give a fuck about, then AI-generated slop it is, because assuming that the recipient is a random person, AI-generated slop has the highest chance of actually getting shit done.

I've seen some very incomprehensibly-written communication in my time, including from people who speak English as a first language.

The most frustrating group of consistent offenders I've seen was comprised of folks who absolutely should know better: School teachers.

If someone reading does this, please, do not. Imperfect English is a lot more pleasant to read than AI slop. It will not sound better, it will sound worse.

I had a high school teacher (algebra II), my favorite coincidentally, who was actually functionally illiterate. He knew some words, and had a solid understanding of the alphabet, but ask him to parse a sentence or god forbid an essay, and he was completely lost.

He was a native born american, english as only language, and simply could not interact with the written language. If he could have written (in 2009) "give 20 question test for week 1 algebra II student with answer guide" he'd have gotten (based on the prompt I just submitted):

Week 1 — Algebra II: 20 Practice Questions

    Simplify: 3(x + 4) − 2(2x − 5).
    Solve for x: 5x − 7 = 2x + 11.
    Solve: 2(x − 3) = 3(x + 1).
    Solve and check: (x/4) + 5 = 11.
    Factor: x^2 + 5x + 6.
    Factor: 4x^2 − 9.
    Factor completely: x^2 − 6x + 9.
    Multiply and simplify: (2x − 3)(x + 4).
    Expand: (x + 2)^2.
    Solve quadratic by factoring: x^2 − x − 12 = 0.
    Use the quadratic formula to solve: x^2 + 4x + 1 = 0.
    Simplify: (3x^2y)(2xy^3).
    Simplify: (x^5)/(x^2).
    Solve for x: 2^(x+1) = 16.
    Evaluate: f(x) = 2x^2 − 3x + 1; find f(2).
    Write equation of a line in slope-intercept form with slope 3 and y-intercept −2.
    Find slope of the line through points (1, 4) and (5, −2).
    Solve the system by substitution: y = 2x + 1 and 3x − y = 4.
    Solve the system by elimination: 2x + 3y = 7 and 4x − 3y = 5.
    Simplify and write in simplest radical form: sqrt(50).

    3x + 12 − 4x + 10 = −x + 22
    5x − 2x = 11 + 7 → 3x = 18 → x = 6
    2x − 6 = 3x + 3 → −6 − 3 = x → x = −9
    x/4 = 6 → x = 24
    (x + 2)(x + 3)
    (2x − 3)(2x + 3)
    (x − 3)^2
    2x^2 + 8x − 3x − 12 = 2x^2 + 5x − 12
    x^2 + 4x + 4
    (x − 4)(x + 3) = 0 → x = 4 or x = −3
    x = [−4 ± sqrt(16 − 4)]/2 = [−4 ± sqrt(12)]/2 = [−4 ± 2√3]/2 = −2 ± √3
    6x^3y^4
    x^3 (assuming x ≠ 0)
    2^(x+1) = 16 = 2^4 → x + 1 = 4 → x = 3
    f(2) = 2(4) − 3(2) + 1 = 8 − 6 + 1 = 3
    y = 3x − 2
    slope = (−2 − 4)/(5 − 1) = (−6)/4 = −3/2
    Substitute y: 3x − (2x + 1) = 4 → 3x − 2x − 1 = 4 → x = 5 → y = 2(5)+1 = 11
    Add equations: (2x+3y)+(4x−3y)=7+5 → 6x = 12 → x = 2. Then 2(2)+3y=7 → 4+3y=7 → 3y=3 → y=1
    sqrt(50) = sqrt(25·2) = 5√2

Things that seem trivial to someone well-read can be insurmountable tasks for millions of people.

Those people may do fine day to day, you don't need to write all that many emails for many if not most jobs, but when they do need to get their intentions across, things might get dicy.

Or course this solution is far from perfect. If you use LLMs to word your message because you're not very proficient in reading or writing, you may not understand what the output is saying, so you can't verify that it didn't misinterpret you.

1. Use Google Eloquent or directly into ChatGPT to dictate the email.

2. Then ask AI to polish, simplify, summarize, and I provide my writing style [0].

That gets sent to the user. I am very careful to not allow the AI to write too much.

The alternative is I spend 20+ minutes writing and re-writing the email.

[0] - https://www.kcoleman.me/writing/slack/2023/03/11/writing-sty...

She uses chatgpt for such with appropriate checks afterwards, all the time. It saves her tons of time, and time is money, time is life spent with kids instead of useless bureaucratic work.

I have tons of similar stories, friends (surgeons, radiologists, all non-native speakers) using chatgpt to write some official application for work permits, motivation letters etc. Just because you don't have certain way of working or work situation doesn't mean its valid for all of us.

The Valley is tripping over themselves to convince the world fancy autocomplete is worth 800 billion.

Plus it's a huge waste of natural resources for the energy usage!

I’ve used the button before, but I think my life would be exactly the same without it.

Google really was competent in the 2005-2020 era (probably further on the left, that’s just as far as I remember).

I don’t think Microsoft has seriously disappointed anybody paying attention since 2012 or so.

  Does Microsoft understand consent?
  
  [ ] Yes
  [ ] Ask again later

Mentioned it in an off-topic company chat but the director has gotten tired of people thinking badly of Google now that we're using Google Workspace and he looks for every parallel there is to be drawn to e.g. Mozilla ("doesn't Thunderbird also show a donations call from time to time?" Yeah, when you open and use the actual program, and they are ultimately a non-profit) but the chat was dead after that... Felt a bit that I was the only person who was fairly perplexed by a legit business pushing ads in notifications

and also the win11 problem:

format C:

I tried to get it to work for five minutes, it couldn’t get it to work.

Then I was so pissed that tried for another thirty minutes to “prompt” my way to get the events created correctly, highlighted the timezone issues…

Then gave up and did it manually in 2 minutes.

It’s to train their AI models. You hate it and then fix it. AI gets “better”.

If they can't make gmail effortless and easy with AI then the whole concept quickly collapses under its own weight. Unfortunately everyone has been doing email (gmail in particular) for literal decades now so adding AI feels especially forced. The "swipe to help you type" prompt actually blocks me pasting text into a new email in the android app which absolutely boggles the mind. I'm about to switch back to K-9 email client which I haven't used in probably a decade just so my email will work again.

Meta and Google ads are kind of a must. It's the only service I cannot replace.

But for everyday humans, Google and Meta are the dark clouds in the sky you can just ignore, you do not need to stand in the rain. No one's making you.

They can be good at grammar checks, but even then I wouldn't fix quite everything, it's better to let some of my natural flaws go through.

And they don't ever forward spam, even if you've set up mailbox forwarding to an external address. There's no option for it. So to ever see those messages, I have to use a complicated custom rule to force it to forward all the spam to me, too.

I think it's too consistent and longlasting a problem to be accidental. I think they're spam-holing all class action notices, instead of just Google ones, so that they can claim it's just a general error in their automatic spam filter.

Google used to have pretty good spam detection but now they seem to have cranked the dial over to err on the side of hiding mail the user actually wanted. It's not a good situation.

How absolutely terrible is the box where you write the emails in web Gmail? I get you need more features than what a simple <textarea> provides, but how can a trillion dollar company make such an absolutely broken piece of crap as the most important part of one of their key products? You delete something and the cursor goes to the end of the email. You ctrl-z and the cursor goes before the first character of the email, not before modifying a string of a completely random length. Like a year ago, and for like a month, there was an area on the right side that didn't accept any clicks at all. Native keyboard shortcuts constantly violated.

We figured out WYSIWYG decades ago, how can it be this bad? I've resorted to writing my emails on a notepad app and pasting them when they are done. I thought it had to be an issue with some browser extensions or something, because I've never heard anyone else complaining about it, but no, it really is that bad.

Do I need to add some sarcasm tag? Hope not as it would prove my point.

mailbox.org € 30.00 / $34.71

10GB+5GB storage, ample aliases, multiple domains, up to 10 family accounts

proton.me € 41.04 / $47.88

15GB storage, 1 account, 10 encrypted email addresses, 1 domain

fastmail.com € 51.44 / $60.00

60 GB storage, 1 account, multiple domains

For more accounts/users (e.g. Proton Unlimited or Fastmail Family), the pricing is reasonable. But mailbox.org certainly looks like the best value at first glance unless you need a lot of storage. If you've got 6 users and/or several domains, FastMail does look pretty nice.

I would say that Fastmail is the "Ferrari of e-mail" services. It does everything well, or extremely well, especially if you have more advanced setups like wildcard domains.

In particularly, I miss being able to send from wildcard domains. While proton has a thing called simplelogin, it only works kind of seamlessly if you get an e-mail on a wildcard address and want to reply to that same address. Sending from any * domain requires you to make the address via the simplelogin page and isn't nearly as seamless. While you can make some sending addresses (i.e. regular aliases) in the protonmail interface, that's a trap, because once you've made an alias, you can't delete it unless there's no mail related to it in your mailbox anymore (even if you have a catch-all setup; I wonder if it has anything to do with how the encryption keys are setup, but it still sucks).

I also miss both snoozing and pinning mail. Officially, the proton mail apps (1) do support snoozing, but that requires "conversation view" to be enabled. I think the conversation view over groups e-mails too aggressively, and don't really understand why snoozing without conversation view isn't possible. It's utterly annoying. As far as I know, pinning e-mails isn't a thing in the proton apps. There are "stars" but these could have been labels (which also exist). They don't pin the e-mail to the top.

The proton mobile apps also lack various settings which are in the web interface, like access to sieves. The apps are sometimes a bit laggy, especially if you have a lot of e-mails, although there seem to have been some improvement on this end. I also still get double "fingerprint to unlock" requests sometimes.

Then there's theming, which I can imagine is (even) more of an opinion, but I liked the Fastmail interface more than the proton interface. I think its cleaner. Not a particular fan of any of the themes of protonmail.

I left Fastmail just as it added offline access. This was originally my biggest gripe. I might have stayed longer if they added it just before I left.

For Proton, they have been releasing a lot of new services lately. I hope they will spend a year or more, just polishing what they currently have. They did say they will spend some time on polish in a blogpost recently, but haven't really seen the fruits from this yet (or I care about different things than they do?). And I hope I will one day be able to add more domains to my account. Even with Visionary, you only get 6 domains for 6 users, and no way to add more.

I sincerely hope Proton will never add any of the AI nagging , the OP was talking about. If they do, I'll leave the instant.

(1) https://proton.me/support/snooze-emails

  You open Proton Mail.

  You'd like to read the second email in your inbox so you hit J a couple times.

  Nothing happens.

  J/K don't work unless an email is already selected so you use your mouse instead.

  You hit T to move the email to the trash.

  You'd like to read the next email so you hit J.

  Nothing happens.

  Hitting T didn't leave you with a selected email so J/K don't work.

Scroll down to:

Grammar suggestions off

Spelling suggestions off

Writing suggestions off (probably the one you want)

I'm starting to develop a squiggly line blindness, so be it if grammar in my email suffers :)

It will happily find you some restaurant reviews for a town you are going to, but useful stuff like "Send a whatsapp to Jane Smith saying I will be 10 minutes late." or "Play XXX from Spotify" it totally fails at.

They have over indexed hard and turned off (formerly) loyal customers. I'm on proton + vivaldi + digital ocean + opencode-go now, replacements for almost every product area. Still need to make the switch to GrapheneOS

Art, I tell you, its art. Now with AI.

Do you want Google to block all mail to you relatively new domains?

I would have assumed it was primarily an attempt at getting you to verify the address is a real, monitored inbox. I guess it's probably a 2 birds with one stone kind of thing, lie about a way to unsubscribe to get off the spam filter and mark the email as a prime target for other domains.

I'm seeing a lot of domains that are clearly registered to spam without a reputational hit to the root domain; for example, wh***teams.work spamming me on behalf of wh***teams.com.

I wish Google'd link them together.

PD: I contacted that person and I formed about the situation some time ago.

They only care about providing a service that is just good enough to keep enough people from jumping ship.

And the cool thing is that damn near every company on the planet is doing the same thing right now so even if you DO jump ship you aren't guaranteed anything better, just shitty in different ways.

My account is ancient; every spammer in the world knows it.

But practically no spam gets through. And there are very few false positives. Going though my spam folder, I see a few legitimate commercial emails that I don't care about, but the rest is junk.

Most of it is being dropped on the floor without even getting into the spam box. I have only 65 emails in my spam folder. A few years ago, there were tens of thousands. I don't know what they did, but at some point they clearly started rejecting the worst of the worst, i.e. the vast majority of it.

I have no idea why your experience is so different. I'm on a Google Workspace; perhaps that's something?

We're now at the place where it's virtually impossible to run your own mailserver and have the mail delivered, consistently at Gmail and Outlook/Live/Hotmail. At least not without hours a month tuning, re-configuring, monitoring etc.

Basically, Gmail, Apple Mail, Microsoft, Yahoo (and to lesser extent, Fast-email, proton, or one of the handfull of dedicated email providers) have cemented an oligopoly. You must invest serious infrastructure, time and effort, or else your mail will be /dev/nulled (at random, often).

This "anti-spam" works, reasonably well. Because Gmail can now trust that Microsoft has measures in place to disencourage new accounts from sending large amounts of mails - and vice versa. Obviously Gmail can trust other Gmail accounts. And so they have a win-win-win.

win: No need for heavy, resource-intensive spam-training or scanning for the bulk of incoming mail - if its from a fellow BigTech, let it through. Win: an almost impossible high barrier to entry for any serious competitors. Win: Lock in, because anyone wishing to move will see their email not reach the inboxes of users at other Big Tech - aka the vast majority of inboxes.

I got a lot of group spam, where someone seems to have created a google group and added my mail to it. And then people answer the spam, and the answer is also send to everyone in the group

The problem? The browsers work fine on everything on the new tablet, EXCEPT gmail. Whenever I try gmail, in Opera or Vivaldi (same versions as on the old tablet), I get something along the lines of "the site can't be found". As if wifi was off. (paraphrased, I don't have one in front of me). Been like that forever. It's baffling.

Buy a domain, own the MX records, send your emails where-ever you want. Then just try live your life, and anytime you log into something, try swap it over to your new domain.

Keep your gmail, keep it as the backup email. Just reduce your risk.

I did NOT do forwarding. It was the easiest way to identify what's still associated with the old address.

It was not a clean break. I still have the old account, and occasionally it turns out something is still contacting me at it. That's ok... 99.9% free and clear is better than 0%.

Getting people to stop emailing my old address was annoying. But also, there were fewer people than I thought that still email instead of messaging. Email is mostly account stuff.

I decoupled. When selecting a new service I intentionally did NOT look for, or use, ten services at one provider. Provider stickiness was what makes the process painful to begin with.

Some accounts will not let you change addresses, ever. For those I just bit the bullet and deleted old accounts and made new ones (like ecobee).

The IdP thing wasn't a huge deal, but I don't do a ton of that anyway.

I also moved to a better password manager, and that helped keep track of what I had moved.

I did some takeout process stuff. Aside from the opportunity to clean up and reimport contacts, I don't think I ever used most of it. Most things were just less important than I thought they would be.

Once done, users still get the...

    "Press / for Help me write" or 
    "Press / to write using your GMail and Drive"

I keep a separate Google account with an @gmail because some web sites don't even let you sign up with non-major-provider domains these days.

We both use Chrome (she on Windows, me on Mac), but I could totally believe that I've turned off some shiny AI feature _in Chrome_ that she hadn't.

Anyone care to confirm or disprove the hypothesis that there's some setting in Chrome itself that will disable this Gmail feature?

Just keep in mind that you don't need to change every single account at once. You just need to change the ones that you use the most, and with time you can change the others that you remember.

this way it doesn't all have to happen at once; you can take your time and just leave the old gmail account up as a forwarder. save all your old emails to your computer for historical stuff, then delete them from gmail if you feel the need.

it doesn't have to be a huge painful transition - you can do it slow and steady :) i've been meaning to do the same for a while but i need to find an email provider i like that lets me bring my own domain.

Do it! minraws.com (if that means anything to you) is available, you could be firstname@minraws.com as well as your @gmail.com before the sun goes down. Personally, I'd set it up to feed into a new mailbox with Protonmail, but if you like you can just have it forward to the familiar gmail inbox you're used to.

You can start moving your accounts over one at a time. It doesn't have to be instant. Yeah, there are probably IRL business cards in drawers and people you haven't contacted in decades that will mean that you want to forward all emails that go to your gmail to a folder/label in your new email domain forever, but that's OK.

Just start.

You or your model do not have and can not a clue how fast or slow I read, or, and that is the point, how much time I intend to spend on whatever is up.

The mirror is that you cannot know who my recipent is, or what I'm trying to communicate. It is equivalent in this sense.

You only [propose to] clutter the already overcluttered interface with crap, slop and shit. So bugger off pretty please. If you do not, there goes your product: outta my window.

Instead of gaining time, you make everyone lose time.

1. Accurate, deterministic, fast search of your email

2. Whatever they call the categorized inbox, I use "Primary," "Promotions," and "Updates."

3. Labels implemented as labels, not mapped clumsily onto the "Folder" concept.

If I were told I had to not use the Gmail UI, I would 100% switch to another email provider immediately, as using Gmail the service with a vanilla IMAP client is way worse than just using a normal email host with the same.

> Sure, I could switch to a different mail client and never see any of these language model features, but my experience these past months has left such a bad taste that all I’m looking for now is a clean break.

The brand/trust is ruined for OP even if there are workarounds to not directly see what Google's doing anymore.

I'd add it's also that there's nobody left to compete with them, either. They own the only desktop browser that matters, and basically the entire concept of the mobile phone itself outside the US (Android), and it seems like 50% or so of the corporate email market, 80% of the consumer email market, a high percentage of the advertising market. I don't think pre-1984 AT&T had half the dominance Google does.

Oh, that must be why the Gmail web interface has so many spans that contain nothing but another span (including the span containing the "Press / to help me write" placeholder text in the message body area when replying). Here you go, boss, it's deeper now!

Some firms go the other way.. I use the "Line" app for communication, and initially (many years ago) it was connected to your phone, which caused difficulties if you moved countries (among other things).

They have, however, now removed the connection to a phone number. Good.

Stop. Yes yes, you are a fine writer with excellent communication skills. You would never stoop so low as to allow a mere machine to write for you, and no such device is going to have anything but the most banal suggestions you would accept (I mean, even the most elite of us make the occasional typo, amirite?).

Many people (most, really) hate writing. It's just difficult, for the same reason that you probably avoid, I dunno, dancing or public performance. People have different skills.

And people who hate writing and know they aren't that great at it still know that their email is likely to land in the inbox of a snob like you. So... they ask for help where they can get it.

To wit: be nice. You're letting your ego drive you to some unpleasant places. There's a fine line between chuckling at inappropriately-AI-enhanced communication and just being an asshole.

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