Gmail thinks I'm stupid, so I left • Hacker News Board

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

#421

Post by tuananh » Wed, Jun 03, 2026, 2:23 AM UTC

cadamsdotcom wrote: post #327

Looking for your alternative? Let me give you some (non financially motivated) praise for Fastmail. It has everything Gmail has - even app passwords, hide my email, and ios integration. The only criticism is the calendar doesn’t autocomplete addresses so that’s a bit more typing than I would like. But everything you do in Fastmail is instant . They live up to the name! Once you try it and go back, you’ll be shocked -…

my only problem with fastmail is their spam filtering is so bad. they mistake legit emails quite often

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

#422

Post by anonymousiam » Wed, Jun 03, 2026, 2:27 AM UTC

I haven't seen this new annoying AI behavior because I use IMAP to access my GMail. After reading this post, I decided to backup my GMail inbox, which is something I've never bothered to do because it's mostly a secondary backup that I rarely use.

So it took a few minutes to finish copying all of the ~1,500 messages or so, and then I went to verify that I got them all. For some odd reason, GMail doesn't let me copy (at least via IMAP) any messages after 1/17/2024. It had no trouble copying everything older than that, dating back to May of 2009. I tried copying just a single message (from last week) and it silently fails every time. I can view the message via IMAP, but I cannot copy it.

Has anybody else seen this?

Update: It seems to be an issue with my mail server because I was able to copy the remaining 205 messages into a local folder.

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

#423

Post by thaumasiotes » Wed, Jun 03, 2026, 2:34 AM UTC

tuananh wrote: post #421

cadamsdotcom wrote: post #327

Looking for your alternative? Let me give you some (non financially motivated) praise for Fastmail. It has everything Gmail has - even app passwords, hide my email, and ios integration. The only criticism is the calendar doesn’t autocomplete addresses so that’s a bit more typing than I would like. But everything you do in Fastmail is instant . They live up to the name! Once you try it and go back, you’ll be shocked -…

my only problem with fastmail is their spam filtering is so bad. they mistake legit emails quite often

That's not exactly a reason to stick with gmail. Gmail will mark anything as spam.

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

#424

Post by philip-zero » Wed, Jun 03, 2026, 2:35 AM UTC

pickleRick243 wrote: post #399

phyzome wrote: post #335

I can heartily recommend going into your Google settings and disabling the global "smart features" option. It removes a huge amount of crap all at once. For GMail, go to Settings -> General ( https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/#settings/general ) and scroll down to "Smart features" and disable that. Then go to the next option, "Google Workspace smart features" and disable them across your entire workspace with 1 or 2 m…

I found the blog post a bit annoying because it was clearly trying to win internet points rather than actually solve a problem. What you wrote above would have resolved the issue in a couple of minutes, faster than moving over to another email provider. I found all the Gemini integration into consumer products super annoying as well and disabled/unpinned all of it months ago the day I noticed it and thought "wth is t…

[dead]

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

#425

Post by wookmaster » Wed, Jun 03, 2026, 2:38 AM UTC

cadamsdotcom wrote: post #327

Looking for your alternative? Let me give you some (non financially motivated) praise for Fastmail. It has everything Gmail has - even app passwords, hide my email, and ios integration. The only criticism is the calendar doesn’t autocomplete addresses so that’s a bit more typing than I would like. But everything you do in Fastmail is instant . They live up to the name! Once you try it and go back, you’ll be shocked -…

Plus one for Fastmail I’ve been using with a custom domain for years now and it’s great. I don’t use Google for anything at this point, though I’m sure they’re still tracking me somehow.

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

#426

Post by alex1138 » Wed, Jun 03, 2026, 2:51 AM UTC

cadamsdotcom wrote: post #327

Looking for your alternative? Let me give you some (non financially motivated) praise for Fastmail. It has everything Gmail has - even app passwords, hide my email, and ios integration. The only criticism is the calendar doesn’t autocomplete addresses so that’s a bit more typing than I would like. But everything you do in Fastmail is instant . They live up to the name! Once you try it and go back, you’ll be shocked -…

Actually occasionally fastmail initially loading seems to hold up for a while for me for some reason

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

#427

Post by ttctciyf » Wed, Jun 03, 2026, 3:07 AM UTC

Personally, as a gmail user of about 2 decades, this is the first I've heard of this particular issue, probably because for some years I don't even read past the word "smart" before disabling whatever feature du jour is being pushed in my face.

I'm just now migrating away from gmail for a different kind of inanity[1] all the same.

1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48367950

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

#428

Post by sedatk » Wed, Jun 03, 2026, 3:09 AM UTC

Guestmodinfo wrote: post #410

Is Fast Mail having human support? Suppose I forget my password or suppose fastmail somehow bans my account then is there a readily available human on the other end whom I can message or talk to. Recently on HN someone posted about a school which lost its 10 years of Google apps data and account with no possible recourse.

Yes: support@fastmail.com

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

#429

Post by VladVladikoff » Wed, Jun 03, 2026, 3:17 AM UTC

why_at wrote: post #151

I can appreciate LLMs for some use cases, but writing emails for the user is the one that really baffles me. It's one thing if you don't speak English well and could use some help making yourself understood, but the amount of native speakers using this is so strange to me. How does this help you? If you can write to the LLM telling it what kind of email to write, you might as well just write the email.

Honest answer, I’m sort of not neurotypical, not formally diagnosed but enough people in my life have gone out of their way to inform me, and so while I do still write emails myself, if it’s for work I usually dump my email into an LLM before sending it and just ask for some minor edits where I could be misconstrued as being rude or offensive. It’s stuff I would normally not notice, but other people take issue with my overtly direct nature of speaking.

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

#430

Post by smukherjee19 » Wed, Jun 03, 2026, 3:17 AM UTC

That's weird. I use Gmail regularly and did not experience anything like that; it works just the way it did for the past 10+ years. And auto categorization still works just fine, and no AI summarizing my email or trying to write my drafts. I wonder what difference we have in settings.

Also, not to be disrespectful to the OP, but seems quite an... overblown reaction. To each their own, though.