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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

#781

Post by baggy_trough »

3form wrote: post #671
j_maffe wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure what you mean by blackmailing but it can't be the right word here.

Feature A exists for years. New feature B enters. If you want to opt out of feature B, you now need to opt out of feature A as well, which you probably liked much more. I don't know a better term than blackmail to describe this. Thesaurus seems to imply blackmail is for money, but so is extortion, and it doesn't give me good suggestions. EDIT: Coercion is more correct, but it's way too mild in my perception.

That sounds extremely dramatic when what we're talking about is features in a mail program.

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

#782

Post by prepend »

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 -…

Thanks for your note. I’ve wanted to get off gmail for years and your description answered many nagging questions I had been too lazy to look up.

I switched my domain over to fastmail and have been using it for the past hour and seems promising. The interaction with the company is nice too and they seem very much “do one thing well” and doesn’t make me feel scummy like every time I interact with google’s products.

Interestingly I didn’t realize how slow gmail was until switching. Not just the web ui. I use the ios mail app and gmail didn’t support push, only fetch. And the app is 17.8MB (compared to gmail’s 716.7MB). Crazy that it’s 40x smaller.

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

#783

Post by Zambyte »

baggy_trough wrote: post #781
3form wrote: post #671

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Feature A exists for years. New feature B enters. If you want to opt out of feature B, you now need to opt out of feature A as well, which you probably liked much more. I don't know a better term than blackmail to describe this. Thesaurus seems to imply blackmail is for money, but so is extortion, and it doesn't give me good suggestions. EDIT: Coercion is more correct, but it's way too mild in my perception.

That sounds extremely dramatic when what we're talking about is features in a mail program.

A little malware is still malware.

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

#784

Post by skrtskrt »

alecco wrote: post #491
monegator wrote: post #468

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If only it was based in europe. Every few weeks i look into detaching from gmail and wonder if proton is the way to go

Proton's being a bit slow and weird is totally worth it just for the privacy features. And it's slowly improving with time.

Agreed, I left Fastmail for Proton and am very happy with it. It improves/changes in fits and starts sometimes, but support is always great and overall I am happy with the usability, direction, pricing, etc.

I do wish ProtonMail handled labels/folders as one unified model like GMail does, it's so much simpler and more ergonomic. But I imagine hoping for a data model change like that is probably a pipe dream.

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

#785

Post by Slow_Hand »

loloquwowndueo wrote: post #705
ghaff wrote: post #374

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't want to unsubscribe from everything that I might not be interested in at the moment but may want to skim now and then to various degrees. I find gmail is very effective for that sort of thing. I find gmail's tabs pretty useful.

Maybe just me but I’d rather have and triage a single inbox instead of several. “Oh it’s in my social inbox that’s why I didn’t see it for 5 days”.

fwiw, you can easily see the contents of these tabs from your inbox. Each tab shows a preview of their two most recent emails, so you can easily monitor the activity. I check them directly 1-2 times a day with a single click. Things rarely get overlooked.

It's a pretty elegant design, which is why I'm so frustrated that Gmail has been the only service where I have found comparable functionality. I'd like to move away from reliance on Google.

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

#786

Post by boston_clone »

I stopped using google as my primary email service a few years ago in favor of the custom domain integration that comes with iCloud+.

If you already have a domain and know what an MX or CNAME record is, it takes less than thirty minutes to set up.

Migrating critical correspondence / autopay / etc. may take some time, but observing how much spam continues to flow to your old inbox will certainly be surprising. Now, it is exceptionally easy for me to keep all messages read, and only use my google account for junk signup forms.

https://support.apple.com/guide/icloud/add-a-domain-you-own-...

https://support.apple.com/en-us/102540

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

#787

Post by hadlock »

stetrain wrote: post #751

A big question about this push for AI/LLM features in products, and I think very related to public sentiment on AI, is that if these features were so desirable and useful why do they need to be so forcefully promoted? If these features were so useful, the internet would be full of articles and viral videos about how to turn them on and use them. Instead, every single software service you sign in to now has to stop yo…

Google announced at their annual blah blah last month that they want to be the center of your digital life. Gmail is probably their most popular/stickiest product after search, so there's a lot of pressure to make sure it is the loss leader in making your life "less complicated" or easier or whatever the thought leadership is this week.

If they can't make gmail effortless and easy with AI then the whole concept quickly collapses under its own weight. Unfortunately everyone has been doing email (gmail in particular) for literal decades now so adding AI feels especially forced. The "swipe to help you type" prompt actually blocks me pasting text into a new email in the android app which absolutely boggles the mind. I'm about to switch back to K-9 email client which I haven't used in probably a decade just so my email will work again.

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

#788

Post by ieee2 »

prepend wrote: post #782
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 -…

Thanks for your note. I’ve wanted to get off gmail for years and your description answered many nagging questions I had been too lazy to look up. I switched my domain over to fastmail and have been using it for the past hour and seems promising. The interaction with the company is nice too and they seem very much “do one thing well” and doesn’t make me feel scummy like every time I interact with google’s products. In…

I would rather invest 10 x 60 Eur = 600 Eur every 10 years into new laptop or bigger RAM rather then trying to switch to non-free email and lose whole Google ecosystem.

Not having much spam is number one priority for me. 50ms delay in refresh rate is OK. In fact I have never noticed and it have never came to my mind that Gmail is slow. Yes, it needs RAM but I was never annoyed by any "slowness".

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

#789

Post by thisislife2 »

Kinrany wrote: post #775
thisislife2 wrote: post #768

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To have a copy of your emails on your device, for backup, and offline use.

A web UI can do that

The comment I was replying to was wondering why people installed apps to read email instead of using the browser based clients. So I don't understand your point ...?

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

#790

Post by microtonal »

teekert wrote: post #489
microtonal wrote: post #483

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I temporarily moved from Fastmail to Proton Mail, but found several downsides: * Loading mails (especially when going quickly through them) has quite some latency. Possibly due to decrypting. * Search is pretty bad compared to Fastmail. * The keyboard shortcuts seem to never work correctly. So I went back to Fastmail for mail (we still use Proton Drive, which has its own set of warts).

Agreed, there are quirks, and there is also an AI writer, though it never disturbed me and hope it never will. But generally the UI is clean and they align with my values. There is a bridge software that bridges Proton and imap so you can use any client. Never used it though, I find the apps pretty good. The latest generation is focussing on off-line use which will hopefully drive down down some of the latency, espec…

Yes, I really hope that they'll fill the Linux client gap soon.
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