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Gmail thinks I'm stupid, so I left

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

#511

Post by frereubu »

vachina wrote: post #454
sshine wrote: post #348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

+1 When I migrated from Gmail to Fastmail years ago, I thought Fastmail felt... less featureful. When I rarely visit my abandoned Gmail, I can't believe I put up with the clunkiness. Lean software stands the test of time. Fastmail hasn't had a noteworthy UI change ever. Minor annoyances: - Clicking an iPhone notification opens the app, but never brings me to the actual email - It is difficult to unfold the full exten…

Why are people accessing emails from the webUI. Email is SMTP and IMAP, use any number of clients to access your email.

I find myself using the web UI because it's much faster than MacOS Mail, which often gets a bit stuck when downloading new emails via IMAP. I'd prefer to use a native app, but it happened without me thinking - I just ended up going for the fastest option unconsciously.

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

#513

Post by przmk »

pmontra wrote: post #462
vachina wrote: post #454

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why are people accessing emails from the webUI. Email is SMTP and IMAP, use any number of clients to access your email.

Probably the nothing to install experience. Every Android phone comes with Gmail and every device has a web browser. Do people have to install Gmail on iOS? I'm using Thunderbird with POP3 accounts, download on my laptop then remove from the server, daily backups. My phone has K9 (the old one with the UI I like) and I never remove messages from the phone. When I send mail from the phone I bcc myself so I can see the…

> Do people have to install Gmail on iOS?

Why would Gmail be pre-installed on iOS?

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

#514

Post by jeroenhd »

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.

21% of Americans are functionally illiterate. 54% of Americans read below a 6th grade level.

Things that seem trivial to someone well-read can be insurmountable tasks for millions of people.

Those people may do fine day to day, you don't need to write all that many emails for many if not most jobs, but when they do need to get their intentions across, things might get dicy.

Or course this solution is far from perfect. If you use LLMs to word your message because you're not very proficient in reading or writing, you may not understand what the output is saying, so you can't verify that it didn't misinterpret you.

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

#515

Post by conductr »

Unai wrote: post #343
programmertote wrote: post #285

Not related to using LLMs for writing email, but something that bothers me about using Gmail lately. There were a couple of lass action lawsuits (like this one: www.GoogleWebAppActivityLawsuit.com) against Google. The emails from both lawsuits went straight to my Gmail account's 'Spam' folder. I'm glad I review my spam box regularly. Hopefully, it's just the false positive effect of the Gmail's spam filter.

If you're gonna go off-topic, I wanna join. How absolutely terrible is the box where you write the emails in web Gmail? I get you need more features than what a simple provides, but how can a trillion dollar company make such an absolutely broken piece of crap as the most important part of one of their key products? You delete something and the cursor goes to the end of the email. You ctrl-z and the cursor goes befor…

I’ll pile on this one. I’ve never quite figured out some of the common formatting icons they use. Text color and text background fill color I guess wrong every single time and think “why is that icon used for that”. I can never find how to edit bullet types. Simple stuff that I never struggle to locate and identify in any other application

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

#516

Post by gosub100 »

Slow_Hand wrote: post #361
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 -…

Does it automatically filter my email into tabs for primary, promotions, social, and updates? Cause that is the single most useful feature offered by Gmail that I have yet to find elsewhere. I'm not talking about manually tagging, setting up, and filtering all incoming email before my inbox can self-organize. I mean automatically. Only show me the true primary items in my inbox from the jump. Everything else can wait…

What's clever about the "promotions" tab being automatic is that it actually makes me want to read them on my own time. Before Gmail my old pattern was classify with read/delete/save. Commercial emails were usually deleted.

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

#517

Post by leke »

I was forwarding something to my wife and I see this other person suggested in the recipient list. The weird way the suggestion UI is designed makes it look like they are already added, but I assumed I would have to select the person in the second forward box to add them. Anyway, I won't migrate for now though because I hardly use email anymore.

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

#518

Post by xigoi »

neogodless wrote: post #156
green_wheel wrote: post #71

> This time I’m doing things the right way by connecting my own domain to a mail host. I’m currently with Fastmail since they were by far the most popular option when I asked for suggestions on the fediverse. Question for the general public: why Fastmail over Proton?

Comparing a few based on cheapest annual plan that includes custom email domains: mailbox.org € 30.00 / $34.71 10GB+5GB storage, ample aliases, multiple domains, up to 10 family accounts proton.me € 41.04 / $47.88 15GB storage, 1 account, 10 encrypted email addresses, 1 domain fastmail.com € 51.44 / $60.00 60 GB storage, 1 account, multiple domains For more accounts/users (e.g. Proton Unlimited or Fastmail Family), t…

purelymail.com: $10.00*

unlimited** storage, unlimited accounts, unlimited domains

*or possibly less if you choose pay-per-use pricing

**soft limit if you use way too much

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

#519

Post by raxxorraxor »

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 -…

I have no idea why people don't just use a standard imap mail client, Thunderbird being the most obvious choice here.

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

#520

Post by conductr »

Meekro wrote: post #308
scrollop wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

This doesn't strike me as "reading" your emails any more than a router is "reading" your packets when it forwards them. As far as I know, Google employees (even high-ranking ones) can't randomly start going through people's messages-- that's the privacy that matters.

No but they can train a model to know everything about you and sell it.

They actually have precedence in that as it’s their legacy ad business.

I could absolutely see them getting more proactive with their ad business. Something like mortgage brokers want to know you executed an offer on a new home (high indication you will be shopping for a lender). Then that turn into, your employer wants to know you’re talking to other employers. Then of course there’s many more nefarious examples people would consider more invasive but may not even realize it leaked from their email provider.

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