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Gmail thinks I'm stupid, so I left

moddedbear.com

111–120 of 865 posts

Re: Gmail thinks I'm stupid, so I left

#111

My Mother received an email from her supermarket confirming her delivery date. It said they were coming tomorrow morning while she was out. She'd just made the booking for a completely different day so she couldn't understand it. She is very old and this confusion made her think her mental decline had accelerated. She was quite distressed. I looked at her gmail (I don't use it) and it took me a moment to realise I wa…

Heck, I order pizzas online regularly (one of the only types of account I haven't migrated off to other email addresses, because it's not very important), and my ASAP pick-up orders usually get an "Arriving tomorrow" banner in the Gmail interface.

Re: Gmail thinks I'm stupid, so I left

#112
post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Their AI push is what convinced me to leave gmail and go buy my own domain. I don't want it.

what do you use as your client?

I've been pretty happy on Fastmail as a custom-domain email host the last few years.

Re: Gmail thinks I'm stupid, so I left

#113
post #59

I just can't stand how Gmail is putting a red line under every other sentence that I write (telling me that my writing style is a "mistake") and aggressively nudging me to rewrite it to make it sound more like AI. Whoever thought such a product would be a good idea should be fired.

Settings->See all settings->General

Scroll down to:

Grammar suggestions off

Spelling suggestions off

Writing suggestions off (probably the one you want)

Re: Gmail thinks I'm stupid, so I left

#114
post #4

I really hope Apple watches what Google and Microsoft are doing with AI, specifically shoving it into their customers' workflow without invitation, and steers far away from that path.

Given that Apple recently started putting ads in Maps, I have no faith in them anymore.

Re: Gmail thinks I'm stupid, so I left

#115
post #5

What surprises me most about gmail and AI is that they seem really quite bad at filtering out obvious spam. I get so many messages from people I have never heard from, on relatively new domains, with endings like "if this isn't relevant for you right now, say "not now" and I'll not circle back" (a clear attempt to allow unsubscribe without using the word). How is it that they haven't figured out how to stop these mes…

Interesting. I never have any problem with spam.

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?

Re: Gmail thinks I'm stupid, so I left

#116
post #92

Please Google let me buy my email and move it to my own service without any restrictions and I will be thankful. I am now in too deep to move away, from my govt licenses to banks to everything else. Switching away from Gmail isn't possible for me, but I will keep trying, I won't give up but hopefully I would never have to realize how big a mistake this was. I feel like I might end up on the streets if gmail goes away…

create a new account elsewhere. set up a forwarder from gmail -> new account. create a filter/label in your new email. when you get an email at your new account, update the service to use your new email.

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.

Re: Gmail thinks I'm stupid, so I left

#117
I find it odd how so many tech involved people here use gmail - are privacy concerns not a concern for them?

I moved to mailbox.org years ago. Pay a few pounds a year for private email with webtools and drive and don't have google snooping my emails and sending me targeted ads.

Re: Gmail thinks I'm stupid, so I left

#118
post #92

Please Google let me buy my email and move it to my own service without any restrictions and I will be thankful. I am now in too deep to move away, from my govt licenses to banks to everything else. Switching away from Gmail isn't possible for me, but I will keep trying, I won't give up but hopefully I would never have to realize how big a mistake this was. I feel like I might end up on the streets if gmail goes away…

switching banks and govt accounts is easy. getting people's address books to switch is hard

Re: Gmail thinks I'm stupid, so I left

#119
post #11

As someone who hosts their own email, I dislike Gmail as much as anyone. But your issue is this: > I go to check my email in Gmail’s web UI.

Gmail has three main features that matter (to me at least) -- and they are huge, very important features. And as much as I don't like this fact, using their official web or mobile clients are the only way to get them:

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.

Re: Gmail thinks I'm stupid, so I left

#120
post #59

I just can't stand how Gmail is putting a red line under every other sentence that I write (telling me that my writing style is a "mistake") and aggressively nudging me to rewrite it to make it sound more like AI. Whoever thought such a product would be a good idea should be fired.

Out of interest - do you trust google reading all your emails? What do you think about privacy?
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