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Bye Bye Gmail

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Re: Bye Bye Gmail

#31

Post by ofalkaed »

Awhile ago when I logged in to my gmail account I was asked if I wanted to try AI summaries, I clicked "no" and nothing has changed in my user experience in either the web interface or mobile apps. It also told me I could that I could enable or disable AI features with the Gemini icon next to the settings icon, which it looks like I can still do, at least in the web interface. Am I missing something?

Being "an early adopter" is not proof of anything other than being an early adopter.

Re: Bye Bye Gmail

#32

Post by otterley »

nelsonfigueroa wrote: post #14
latchkey wrote: post #11

I'm very happy with MimeStream. I get gmail, without the UX of gmail, and something that I can command-tab into, instead of a browser window.

Looked up Mimestream. So it's a subscription-based app that basically gives you nicer UI/UX for your google emails. Oof.

Only on HN will someone who makes money writing software complain that other fellow developers are asking for money from him for their software.

Re: Bye Bye Gmail

#33

Post by sodapopcan »

puttycat wrote: post #22

I have more than 20 years of email in my gmail account. How do I even start migrating? And even if I migrate, I will need to keep my address alive and forwarding to my new address at least for a few years. So no privacy gains there either. Does anyone have concrete advice as to how to make the transition?

> I will need to keep my address alive and forwarding to my new address at least for a few years. So no privacy gains there either.

Ya, there's no way of not letting google know what your new address is, but you're going to be emailing a lot of gmail addresses anyway so there's no way around that, really. But with the forwarding they only know incoming mail.

I switched off gmail 3.5 years ago and all I can say is that it wasn't anywhere near as scary as I thought it would be. I setup an auto-responder that would hound people to update their contacts for me and slowly switched over services I cared about (and closed others!) An important point, though, is that I don't really care about old emails. I do still have access to my gmail account, of course, but I have yet to go back. Surely there is a way to export everything and import it into something searchable, though?

Re: Bye Bye Gmail

#34

Post by sph »

andrewchilds wrote: post #12
throw7 wrote: post #9

"My email is now being hosted by Microsoft..." Out of the pan, into the fire. my recommendation: i've been happily using fastmail for years.

Maybe it’s just me, but I have serious issue with Fastmail’s spam filtering. Meaning, it seems that I am the spam filter. I find myself considering closing the account on a regular basis because of it. I am also extremely frustrated with Gmail’s AI features now being apparently impossible to disable.

> Fastmail’s spam filtering

I had issues with it early on, and after some back and forth with support they explained to me what is going on: it takes about 200 spam emails before your personalized filter kicks in, before that you might see something slip through. Also, the spam filter updates after you delete emails from your spam folder. Just remember to empty your spam folder, and add some custom rules until you reach that 200 threshold.

5+ years in, everything is working great, nothing to complain, best email provider I've ever used. I only wish they had servers in the EU.

Re: Bye Bye Gmail

#35

Post by whyagaindavid »

Foorack wrote: post #24

Both me and partner switching to Infomaniak (also Swiss), can recommend. Not E2E encrypted, but kMail is more usable than ProtonMail (also a lot cheaper on all levels). Been using ProtonMail for 5 years but so annoying I can't propely search my emails because of the encryption, can't use standard IMAP without a proprietary connector, and their Drives/Docs suite is missing a lot of features.

Account creation needs phone number?

Re: Bye Bye Gmail

#36

Post by nicholasjarnold »

puttycat wrote: post #22

I have more than 20 years of email in my gmail account. How do I even start migrating? And even if I migrate, I will need to keep my address alive and forwarding to my new address at least for a few years. So no privacy gains there either. Does anyone have concrete advice as to how to make the transition?

Fastmail provides an easy way to migrate [0]. I setup a label in my Fastmail account that will tag all mail coming in from Gmail. Then you go through that list at your leisure and make the requisite contact with the people or services emailing at the old address. It's really not difficult at all. I've been on Fastmail for ~4 years now, and haven't once considered looking back or regretted it. Good luck.

[0] https://www.fastmail.com/features/migrate/

Re: Bye Bye Gmail

#37

Post by noitpmeder »

latchkey wrote: post #20
nelsonfigueroa wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Looked up Mimestream. So it's a subscription-based app that basically gives you nicer UI/UX for your google emails. Oof.

$50/year for a nice app that I use on a daily basis to make my life better? Worth every penny.

But google still is presumably still training their AIs on your email content regardless if you don't use their frontend.

Re: Bye Bye Gmail

#38

Post by sph »

puttycat wrote: post #22

I have more than 20 years of email in my gmail account. How do I even start migrating? And even if I migrate, I will need to keep my address alive and forwarding to my new address at least for a few years. So no privacy gains there either. Does anyone have concrete advice as to how to make the transition?

Fastmail migration takes about 20 seconds, and you can use your gmail identity from the Fastmail web app.

Re: Bye Bye Gmail

#39

Post by B1FIDO »

shawn_w wrote: post #4
tklenke wrote: post #2

Recently I was surprised to see a Google Gemini summary at the top of my email on my phone. A day or two later this appeared in my web client as well. Look, I love our new overlords (for the record m'lords I nearly always use please and thank you. I was an early adopter. I still am a frequent user..I mean someone who has all the answers and blows smoke up my ass..perfect right! Despite that, it appears it's not good…

Other long-time features are now tied to having those stupid summaries enabled too. It's an all or nothing deal. So frustrating and unnecessary.

Speaking of botched LLM summaries, my bank has been doing this to me for several months now.

Instead of the transaction info which is strictly defined and uniformly formatted, they've attempted to give "friendly names" to each one and "simplify" the descriptions.

This has been a supremely bad idea. Firstly, it deprives me of essential info about each transaction, which I cannot access at all in the mobile app. I need to go into the website on a desktop computer, click through a few screens to say "this description is incorrect!" and request that they show me the original.

The "simple descriptions" elide a lot of useful info, such as the vendor's phone number.

Sometimes they are completely incorrect, like the name of my church gets a completely different and misleading name in every transaction. I cannot disable this.

Last year, there was a transaction during tax time that I believed to be some sort of penalty by the government, and I was freaking out about it, but it turned out to actually be my refund and had been "helpfully renamed" by my bank to be extremely misleading.

I have discussed these issues with the online support staff, and in person at my branch, and they are sympathetic, but there is nothing they can do about the app, and the only workaround for me is to individually flag each transaction as it comes in, and fix it, and there is no "global disable" or "global unfuck everything" button for any of us, anywhere.

Re: Bye Bye Gmail

#40

Post by marcd35 »

puttycat wrote: post #22

I have more than 20 years of email in my gmail account. How do I even start migrating? And even if I migrate, I will need to keep my address alive and forwarding to my new address at least for a few years. So no privacy gains there either. Does anyone have concrete advice as to how to make the transition?

are you only using the web based version?

A dedicated client like Mozilla's Thunderbird might be helpful for de-cluttering.

Notion Mail also seems like it has potential - ability to group together certain types of mail.

Someone already recommended Google Takeout to back up all your mail, then finding a business email host that can easily import your data

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