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Comment by arjie | Hacker News Reader

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.

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Unfortunately, this also turns off the Primary/Promotions/Social/Updates categorization.

But so does the author's solution of switching to Fastmail so surely that's not a non-negotiable feature. Manual labeling and filtering still works.

I've seen those categorizations used, and to me they're totally useless. I instead filter messages in the Filter settings, and apply labels and other things as I wish. This works exactly as I need it, unlike the Google categorizations.

Disabling those Primary/Promotions/etc. tabs is the first thing I do whenever I setup a new Gmail account.

I just want to see my inbox, I don't trust an AI filter to sort emails for me.

> the setting is in General and then Cmd-F "smart" and turn everything off.

Once done, users still get the...

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

...prompt, crapped onto every new email. Find the lever to disable that; I dare you.

uBlock Origin. The easy customizability of web applications is why I prefer them over other proprietary applications when there are no open source choices.

In this particular case, if the whole UI is irredeemable, you can access your mail with IMAP or POP.

> uBlock Origin.

I did try this without success.

> if the whole UI is irredeemable, you can access your mail with IMAP or POP.

I access my mail across a doz machines - and I support scores of users. Setting up stand-alone/3rd party clients (at scale) is a bit unwieldy.

The bad actor here turns out to be the Chrome browser. Every other browser behaves better in this.

  mail.google.com##div[aria-label="Message Body"] span[contenteditable="false"]

It is admittedly a bit beyond "easy customizability" once you find yourself sifting through element attributes in the dev console to craft a selector ("easy" shouldn't require knowing what any of those things are, I would think), but in case you still want to actually do it, this seems to work.

They have an ungodly number of event listeners. Why do they need so many? And I keep finding spans nested inside spans for no reason; i.e., the parent span only contains a child span. It's such an outrageous mess

I never see any "Press / for.." or anything like that. I rejected all the 'smart' features when gmail one day popped up an announcement about them.

From this I can infer you are not using Chrome (the source of those can't be disabled prompts).

That's correct - I've never used Chrome, I've used Chromium but not now. I'm using gmail with Vivaldi (chrome-based) and Firefox.

I guess you might need to use AI to summarize the article for you, because he addresses the fact that you can’t turn the intrusive AI off without also turning off some things he finds helpful.

That was ... easy.

Why do people have to go to this, to turn off the AI slop?

Because AI is the next hot thing and it would be impossible to ship our product without AI features available... but for some reason users don't tend to opt into our new AI features that I staked my career on... Am I so out of touch? No, it's the users that are wrong. Opt them in by default and our usage will skyrocket!

Google+ says hello!

is gmail a paid service?

Yes, people pay with their personal data (Alphabet is not a charity)

> is gmail a paid service?

Yes it is.

We pay $6-$14 per user per mo, for the privilege of dealing with GMail's foistware.

Google can’t spend two decades getting bazillions of people to rely on what’s essentially internet infrastructure at this point, and then pretend their hands aren’t dirty when they suddenly crank the enshittification juicer up to 11 because they need to justify the gobsmscking capex for their largely hated new service. There’s nothing legally stopping them from doing that, but that’s very different than right and wrong.

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