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Gmail thinks I'm stupid, so I left

moddedbear.com

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

#631

Post by Freak_NL »

Gigachad wrote: post #597
GoblinSlayer wrote: post #555

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>so many glaring issues like what?

From memory, there are no bulk actions, so if you want to say select all emails and delete you have to send thousands of requests. If you want to rename a folder you have to send a request for every email in the folder. There is no way to set up filters that run server side, there is no way to get push notifications. And probably a million other things that don’t hold up today.

Sending those thousands of requests is something your mail client does for you. Deleting 5000 emails takes a few minutes, but how often do you do that? I can select a bunch of emails in Thunderbird and just do stuff with it just fine.

For server side filters I just set them up in Fastmail using the web UI. That's the type of action I do once or twice a year, so totally OK to hop on over to the web app for just that.

I have no idea what you mean by 'push notifications'. I have Thunderbird open on my desktop, and it shows me when there is email. I have K9 on my smartphone, and it shows me when there is email (I don't have it set up to display notifications, but that seems possible). That's basically all I need to do email.

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

#632

Post by dd8601fn »

slavoingilizov wrote: post #587

So many seem to have made a similar move. But the one thing holding me back: starting with a new email address. My email address is not just for email. It's so firmly embedded in my digital life, it's hard to think how to remove it. It's my identity. I use "login with Google" in most places where it's available. It's my backup recovery for my MFA authenticator. It's my github alias. So what is the strategy everyone f…

I did this. I just had to resign myself to it being an ongoing process.

I did NOT do forwarding. It was the easiest way to identify what's still associated with the old address.

It was not a clean break. I still have the old account, and occasionally it turns out something is still contacting me at it. That's ok... 99.9% free and clear is better than 0%.

Getting people to stop emailing my old address was annoying. But also, there were fewer people than I thought that still email instead of messaging. Email is mostly account stuff.

I decoupled. When selecting a new service I intentionally did NOT look for, or use, ten services at one provider. Provider stickiness was what makes the process painful to begin with.

Some accounts will not let you change addresses, ever. For those I just bit the bullet and deleted old accounts and made new ones (like ecobee).

The IdP thing wasn't a huge deal, but I don't do a ton of that anyway.

I also moved to a better password manager, and that helped keep track of what I had moved.

I did some takeout process stuff. Aside from the opportunity to clean up and reimport contacts, I don't think I ever used most of it. Most things were just less important than I thought they would be.

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

#633

Post by sourcecodeplz »

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…

The author did say he tried some settings but not everything was available to disable. I dove deeper into it here [0]. You can disable Gemini AI and others and there is also a "nuclear option" where you disable all smart features.

[0]: https://favs.eu.org/disable-gmail-ai/

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

#634

Post by duskdozer »

NagatoYuzuru wrote: post #435
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.

As a non native English speaker, letting an LLM translate my emails is actually a sweet trap that’s all too easy to fall into. But Gemini in Gmail DOESN’T SUPPORT non English input. What’s the point of this thing?

>As a non native English speaker, letting an LLM translate my emails is actually a sweet trap that’s all too easy to fall into.

There's a big difference between running your input through DeepL and asking [ChatGPT] to rewrite it. I don't know how we got to the latter being the go-to

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

#635

Post by Freak_NL »

GoblinSlayer wrote: post #562
nexus7556 wrote: post #473

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you kidding me about the spam? I have 3-4 spam emails land in my inbox every day on Fastmail. It's horrendous.

Doesn't Fastmail provide aliases?

Infinite email masks. Doesn't help much once your real email address is out there though.

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

#636

Post by rsynnott »

franze wrote: post #12
kordlessagain wrote: post #3

LinkedIn (the company not the other users) thinks I'm stupid, so I also left it.

I love LinkedIn. Its the world biggest art project, mirroring all the trivialities of our work life and business bigotry right back into our faces in an endless feedback loop. Art, I tell you, its art. Now with AI.

The fascinating thing about LinkedIn is how little LLMs have changed it; even before LLMs, most LinkedIn content was written is that awful inane botslop style.

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

#637

Post by A_Venom_Roll »

gs17 wrote: post #330

It's really bizarre at this point. I'm okay with things like having one-click options for simple replies like "That time works for me" (Google Messages on Android is hilariously bad at these but it's at least useful occasionally). I'm not okay with it suggesting a whole point-by-point response to someone else. Today I had an email from a colleague where it had a suggested reply so large it didn't fit in the preview b…

I see what you did there :)

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

#638

Post by tpm »

jorisw wrote: post #608
tpm wrote: post #548

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every desktop mail client is bad in its own way. And then I have to set it up on all computers I use. Web UI just works.

Guess you've tried every desktop mail client? I only use one computer and my local mail app (macOS's in my case) just works. I can't imagine trading it for visiting some web site to read my email.

Good for you. I've tried a few during the last 30 years and once Web UIs started being usable (after gmail), I use them if possible.

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

#639

Post by c16 »

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 -…

A big +1 for fastmail, but their official ios app is 0/10 the last time I used it. Not a big problem if you use mail.app or their website on desktop.

Something I've done and which has been a big quality of life improvement is to set up a folder with 30 day retention, then an email rule to move any emails with `+` or apple relay there. Those are legitimate emails I want to read such as online order status, but I don't need them in my every day email.

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

#640

Post by Dylan16807 »

a96 wrote: post #610
Dylan16807 wrote: post #445

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is exactly zero chance the gmail team is unaware that epiqnotice.com is a legitimate sender of class action messages and getting falsely blocked.

But there is a non-zero chance that the false blocking can happen without any human intervention.

So what?

Not fixing it for multiple years means it's on purpose. (Unless they had some ridiculous cuts to the team size.)

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