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Google denies 'misleading' reports of Gmail using your emails to train AI

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Re: Google denies 'misleading' reports of Gmail using your emails to train AI

#21

Post by john01dav »

dontlaugh wrote: post #10
tietjens wrote: post #5

The only reason I am still using gmail is due to choice paralysis. I do not know which email service to choose and pay for. I do not like Proton. Is Fastmail the way to go? There is also the German one posteo. Should I just use Apple's mail? I'm taking suggestions if you have anything to share.

The first step is to get your own domain. You can set that up in Apple Mail at first if it’s most convenient. Then you can get everything moved over. After that it’s much easier to move provider again.

How often do big providers like Gmail, customers of whom you will want to communicate with, eat the emails? I know that this is common if you run your own email server, and often just gone and not even to spam.

Google would probably justify this as security, and not necessarily unreasonably, but it has a clear anti-competitive effect too. The security concerns would be more credible if they made it easy to debug this, like giving a useful error message back to the sender stating what the missing security criteria are and having a clear process for appeals (like if you got unlucky with an IP address, or if you are missing a specific security measure on your domain).

Re: Google denies 'misleading' reports of Gmail using your emails to train AI

#22

Post by dontlaugh »

john01dav wrote: post #21
dontlaugh wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The first step is to get your own domain. You can set that up in Apple Mail at first if it’s most convenient. Then you can get everything moved over. After that it’s much easier to move provider again.

How often do big providers like Gmail, customers of whom you will want to communicate with, eat the emails? I know that this is common if you run your own email server, and often just gone and not even to spam. Google would probably justify this as security, and not necessarily unreasonably, but it has a clear anti-competitive effect too. The security concerns would be more credible if they made it easy to debug this…

I haven’t caught it happening, at least not so far.

I have my domain pointed at Apple Mail, though. That probably helps.

Re: Google denies 'misleading' reports of Gmail using your emails to train AI

#23

Post by sofixa »

dwroberts wrote: post #19

When you disable all of these features, eventually it turns off email categorisation. At first this was annoying to me because it’s obviously a very good feature. But the last few weeks have been quite revealing: I’ve been receiving and unsubscribing from tons of emails I had no idea I even received regularly, because categories buried them away. I wonder how much of newsletter marketing (and paid email marketing) is…

> I wonder how much of newsletter marketing (and paid email marketing) is being propped up by the GMail categories just silently ingesting tons of stuff that people never read or see (but also never unsubscribe from)

I don't know, gmail regularly tells me "you haven't opened an email from XYZ newsletter in a while, do you want to unsubscribe?", with a direct button to do so.

Re: Google denies 'misleading' reports of Gmail using your emails to train AI

#24

Post by Taek »

sofixa wrote: post #23
dwroberts wrote: post #19

When you disable all of these features, eventually it turns off email categorisation. At first this was annoying to me because it’s obviously a very good feature. But the last few weeks have been quite revealing: I’ve been receiving and unsubscribing from tons of emails I had no idea I even received regularly, because categories buried them away. I wonder how much of newsletter marketing (and paid email marketing) is…

> I wonder how much of newsletter marketing (and paid email marketing) is being propped up by the GMail categories just silently ingesting tons of stuff that people never read or see (but also never unsubscribe from) I don't know, gmail regularly tells me "you haven't opened an email from XYZ newsletter in a while, do you want to unsubscribe?", with a direct button to do so.

It does? I have never once seen this in my life.

Re: Google denies 'misleading' reports of Gmail using your emails to train AI

#25

Post by Angostura »

tietjens wrote: post #5

The only reason I am still using gmail is due to choice paralysis. I do not know which email service to choose and pay for. I do not like Proton. Is Fastmail the way to go? There is also the German one posteo. Should I just use Apple's mail? I'm taking suggestions if you have anything to share.

I'm an iCloud+ subscriber and have moved a couple of my e-mail addresses across to use Apple's servers (about a year ago) for 'free'.

So far, it has worked consistently with no problems. The only annoyance is iyt doesn't seem that you can break multiple icloud-hosted mailboxes out into their own GUI mailboxes in the Mail client - they all get dumped into a Mailbox called 'Cloud'

Re: Google denies 'misleading' reports of Gmail using your emails to train AI

#26

Post by Hard_Space »

tietjens wrote: post #5

The only reason I am still using gmail is due to choice paralysis. I do not know which email service to choose and pay for. I do not like Proton. Is Fastmail the way to go? There is also the German one posteo. Should I just use Apple's mail? I'm taking suggestions if you have anything to share.

Fastmail; I moved nearly three years ago, and never regretted it. If you can stand the five-eyes aspect, of course.

Also, I use its under-publicized 10GB of free space (i.e., additional to the 10GB of mail space allowance) to more than comfortably host LDAP data such as my Joplin data, and Floccus bookmarks.

Re: Google denies 'misleading' reports of Gmail using your emails to train AI

#27

Post by sofixa »

Taek wrote: post #24
sofixa wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I wonder how much of newsletter marketing (and paid email marketing) is being propped up by the GMail categories just silently ingesting tons of stuff that people never read or see (but also never unsubscribe from) I don't know, gmail regularly tells me "you haven't opened an email from XYZ newsletter in a while, do you want to unsubscribe?", with a direct button to do so.

It does? I have never once seen this in my life.

Might be a mobile app / EU-based account only thing, but I've seen it numerous times and I'm almost certain I've seen it on the web version of Gmail too.

Re: Google denies 'misleading' reports of Gmail using your emails to train AI

#28

Post by mrweasel »

criddell wrote: post #8
agluszak wrote: post #2

> Enabling the feature in Workspace says that “you agree to let Google Workspace use your Workspace content and activity to personalize your experience across Workspace,” according to the settings page, but according to Google, that does not mean handing over the content of your emails to use for AI training. Google be like: "trust me bro"

If you are using Google Workspace you decided to trust them a while ago.

Maybe circumstances have changed? I certainly trusted 2008 Google a lot more than Google in 2025. It's really amazing to see a company just throw trust and goodwill out the window, even worse to see that it pays.

Re: Google denies 'misleading' reports of Gmail using your emails to train AI

#29

Post by Dusseldorf »

john01dav wrote: post #21
dontlaugh wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The first step is to get your own domain. You can set that up in Apple Mail at first if it’s most convenient. Then you can get everything moved over. After that it’s much easier to move provider again.

How often do big providers like Gmail, customers of whom you will want to communicate with, eat the emails? I know that this is common if you run your own email server, and often just gone and not even to spam. Google would probably justify this as security, and not necessarily unreasonably, but it has a clear anti-competitive effect too. The security concerns would be more credible if they made it easy to debug this…

Having your own domain connected to Apple Mail or Proton is fundamentally different than hosting your own email. Only the latter is at much risk of that.

Re: Google denies 'misleading' reports of Gmail using your emails to train AI

#30

Post by jsnell »

ljlolel wrote: post #3

Some people worked on this. They don’t train on it directly. They use AI to rewrite the content “privacy-safe” then train on that….

Do you have any kind of source for that, or did you just make it up? If the latter, why?
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