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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

#661

Post by Dylan16807 »

dspillett wrote: post #645
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.

There is also zero chance that there are not a fair few people who consider their messages to be UCE¹ even if they are actually due thruppence-ha'penny as their share of the class action win , and who therefore mark them as such which is a signal that automated filter management algorithms will pick up on. -------- [1] They are email, from a commercial entity, and in many cases were not asked for, after all.

And those automated algorithms based on feedback need to not cross user accounts in this case. Or be disabled entirely for the domain.

I'm not accusing them of making the problem on purpose, I'm accusing them of not fixing it on purpose.

The notice may be from a commercial entity but it's court-ordered. It's not spam.

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

#662

Post by vonunov »

quuxplusone wrote: post #274
WarOnPrivacy wrote: post #217

I focus the message body area and underneath my cursor appears the message “Press / for Help me write”. I got this and went a bit mad pushing every Gmail lever there was. Eventually I worked out that the Chrome browser was puking this onto my unwritten Gmail messages. I had been using Chrome for just Gmail, because of Gmail's sabotagey hostility toward Firefox. On my 10+ machines I swapped Chrome for Bromium, ungoogl…

Is it something about using Chrome? My wife's Gmail was showing the "Press / to help me write" prompt last week and we couldn't figure out (1) how to turn it off nor (2) why _I_ wasn't seeing any such prompt in _my_ Gmail, despite all our Gmail settings being the same as far as I could tell. We both use Chrome (she on Windows, me on Mac), but I could totally believe that I've turned off some shiny AI feature _in Chro…

I saw the "Press /" using Thorium (a Chromium fork). Tried to use the element picker in uBlock to get rid of it. This failed, of course, because the thing to be blocked disappears as soon as the text input area loses focus, even after I deleted every event listener that I thought could have been relevant.

In a Firefox fork (Floorp) using another Google account but with the seemingly relevant part of Gmail configuration matching, I don't see "Press /" at all. Not sure why exactly, it's a somewhat interesting question but I already went poking through dev console to write a selector for it and I'm starting to get irritated at the idea of spending any more time on it, lol

uBlock:

  mail.google.com##div[aria-label="Message Body"] span[contenteditable="false"]
or user styles / Stylus / etc.:

  div[aria-label="Message Body"] span[contenteditable="false"] { display: none !important; }

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

#663

Post by sebmellen »

singleshot_ wrote: post #279
sebmellen wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The most frustrating thing to me is to receive a 5-paragraph-plus email that was clearly written with some AI that filled in the email with vapid and useless talking points, like "Let me know if you need any other blah blah blah; While there is clearly a need for system improvement, we are working hard to address the underlying and fundamental issue; This is a lesson that it's not just a feature, it's a critical path…

LLM-written emails are too wordy. But maybe people think that’s what a good email is. (Did an LLM write your post?)

I would never disgrace you with reading my LLM output unless I explicitly identified it

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

#664

Post by vonunov »

mvkel wrote: post #192

One of the most frustrating parts about Google's approach to AI in general is their project manager-y directive from on-high, that any Google product needs to adopt all Google's AI tools, wherever possible, and will be ranked on how deeply the integration goes. In the margins: the user.

> and will be ranked on how deeply the integration goes.

Oh, that must be why the Gmail web interface has so many spans that contain nothing but another span (including the span containing the "Press / to help me write" placeholder text in the message body area when replying). Here you go, boss, it's deeper now!

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

#666

Post by pickleRick243 »

sourcecodeplz wrote: post #633
pickleRick243 wrote: post #399

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/

Yes, I disabled all smart features. I'm surprised anyone here (or the type who bothers customizing their inbox layout) finds the Primary/Social/Promotions split useful. The original blog post mentioned "automatic thread categorization", which I thought just meant grouping emails in a conversation together (which doesn't really require any "smart" logic).

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

#668

Post by egorfine »

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 -…

Moved to Fastmail from Gmail like 15 years ago and I couldn't be happier.

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

#669

Post by sebastiennight »

dhdjddhx wrote: post #162
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?

I have anecdotally heard that proton has some more deliverability issues than Fastmail since it’s more preferred by scammers for its privacy features. That influenced my decision since I was probably already going to face some delivery challenges being on a custom domain.

My anecdotal experience has been the opposite. We used to have an old email domain which, due to Google workspace misconfiguration, had terrible deliverability. Switching to Proton solved all our problems on that side.

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

#670

Post by meixger »

f4stjack wrote: post #564
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 -…

Just a small note about fastmail: Do not launch a trial with your planned username. Because I have opened up a trial account, it expired and when I decided to reactivate it (with payment in mind) I find myself unable to sign in. I cannot reset my password as it says "Sorry, we canʼt find an account with that username." and it does not let me log in. Then again I also moved from gmail to mailbox.org and am a happy cam…

Ditto: I've also lost my Proton username because my trial account has expired.
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