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 - Gmail makes you stare at its logo for multiple seconds while it shrugs and eventually loads.. then takes over the top of your inbox with “try our new AI features!” which never remembers that you dismissed it 50 times in a row. Everything in gmail is SO slow, while Fastmail doesn’t even bother with animations. No animations will confuse you until you settle in and realise that yes, things can be nice.

Fastmail data migration brought across my 22 years of emails over the course of about 30 hours with zero help from me. Search on Fastmail finds everything - even back to when you could only get Gmail with a friend code. There’s nothing left on the other side, it’s all here with me.

Going back to my brand new startup inbox (G Suite) gives me the same feelings I get wandering a castle ruin.

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.

Today I had an email from a colleague where it had a suggested reply so large it didn't fit in the preview box. The response was the usual LLM "sounds good but doesn't say anything" prose. It's not just unhelpful — it's a waste of everyone's time!

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 more toggles.

Finally, just switch to Fastmail or something. :-)

It is maddening how much they are pushing this useless and inaccurate garbage on us.

Gmail summaries are nonsensical most of the times. The suggested replies completely miss the intent of the original message I was trying to write.

Most AI integrations around are basically alpha-quality code, that if there wasn't this forced pressure to adopt AI, AI, AI at any cost, they wouldn't have been shipped in this state at all.

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 you with popups, chat windows, and sparkle animations to show you all of the shiny new AI features they have added, like they're all Microsoft trying to convince you to switch your browser to Edge.

I like my writing style. Sure it may leave some sort of linguistic fingerprint and it may not meet some LLM’s idea of what “good” looks like, but I don’t care.

What’s worrying is that the rewrite-by-default behavior is probably there because most users want it.

Hit RETURN. New paragraph. Begin considering what you will write. Prompt pops up: “Help me write.” Every time.

It’s incredibly distracting and turning it off is hard wired into disabling about 1000 other features.

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.

Gmail is the email provider for people that like to claim they never got the email. Google has somehow made the most reliable messaging medium, unreliable.

It is obvious that Google simply doesn't care about email. So it makes perfect sense for them to use Gmail to promote something that they do care about.

LLMs have made one thing clear: intellectual laziness is even more pervasive than we previously thought, even among "knowledge workers".

Malware. Call it what it is. Software that intentionally subverts and acts against the user’s intent is malware. It’s important to call malware what it is because people don’t even realize they shouldn’t use it when it’s not called malware. Instead, they get "used to" using malware.

Question for the general public: why Fastmail over Proton?

Migadu has been a breeze, very sane and transparent payment model, human support, infinite domains and accounts (!). What I really miss are calendar features which are just underdeveloped, but it seems mostly the Microsoft and Google have ruined that area by doing whatever they want.

I like the instructions Migadu gave for copying your emails over - just open thunderbird and copy or move everything from one account. I put everything in an Archive folder so can find it if ever needed. Just insanely pragmatic and it worked.

So it took a few minutes to finish copying all of the ~1,500 messages or so, and then I went to verify that I got them all. For some odd reason, GMail doesn't let me copy (at least via IMAP) any messages after 1/17/2024. It had no trouble copying everything older than that, dating back to May of 2009. I tried copying just a single message (from last week) and it silently fails every time. I can view the message via IMAP, but I cannot copy it.

Has anybody else seen this?

Update: It seems to be an issue with my mail server because I was able to copy the remaining 205 messages into a local folder.

Just in case, it works with any SMTP/IMAP setup like Fastmail, or any other. Proton mail works as well but need a little more to setup initially, even gmail (but much slower as the article explains, I noticed that too)

[1] https://neomd.ssp.sh

Whoever thought such a product would be a good idea should be fired.

1) Lots of features got moved around and there are now many "Write with AI", "Generate image with AI", etc buttons polluting user interfaces even though I don't use them and don't want to use them.

2) Actually, I would use some of these features if I didn't have to do a full opt-in to Smart Features for Google Workspace. If I'm writing a blog post and want to generate a cat picture, that doesn't mean I want to turn on invasive AI-enhanced features in every Google App under the sun. Gemini's chat interface is similar from I can tell: either I can see my search history but Google can train off of it, or if I don't want Google to train off of my chats then I can turn History off but then I can't view it myself. Why isn't there an option for me to see my history but not Google?? They're just the worst at caring about UX.

I looked at her gmail (I don't use it) and it took me a moment to realise I wasn't looking at the email. I was looking at an AI summary of it, and it was completely wrong. The only important information in the message was the delivery date, and the AI had hallucinated a different one. So I disabled the AI features.

But I do wonder how many people have, for example, missed job interviews or funerals because of this bullshit. Google has utter contempt for their users.

I've been using iCloud email with a custom domain for a while, and it has been super conveninent, stable and spam-free. I also trust Apple more than Google in terms of privacy rn. So if you already pay for iCloud, give it a try.

I went the de-google route years ago already. Granted, I am still using some Google services, but I am not at all emotionally attached to it in any way. If Google were to go extinct tomorrow, I would be super-happy, and I am also 100% certain of that, no matter which repercussion would come as a result. Youtube gone? No problem if Google is also gone. Besides, some video site would emerge after that anyway, so really - who needs Google? Let's get rid of it already. It was an annoying adCompany for many years. Now it is an AI adSlop company.

The issues the author describes are issues with Gmail’s web interface, not with the email service itself.

At the time I was paying for DNS. Then, most, if not all, DNS registrars which are not requiring a whatng cartel web engine are now gone.

The email people were careful to design the email system to work without DNS, then I went IPv[46] literals. It is stronger than SPF, since if the SMTP IP does no match the IPs in the envelope and the headers the email will be dropped.

But the "geniuses" at gmail ignore that and say that I don't have a DNS PTR record... how convenient... (My ISP does provide a PTR service... gated behind the requirement of a 'whatng cartel' web engine...).

And I don't forget about "spamhaus", a shady swiss/andoran company, which many email admins have a weird tendency to pay that for their block lists which includes ISP consumer IPs (people do not have the right to have an email server, ofc).

We are going to endup with with compuserve/AOL all over again.

How is it that they haven't figured out how to stop these messages from getting through? I'm at the point that I'm considering those email services that require the sender to confirm they're human before an email is delivered. It would be a hassle to people I communicate with (once), but the ongoing hassle to me is sizable enough that I'm considering it.

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

The message they are sending is you, as a user, do not matter to them. Only the analytics and KPIs do.

They spent lavishly on this crap without asking if anyone actually wanted it first. Now they're stuck with a bad investment and no uptake.

As usual, in the world of corporate power, you are just the inconvenient flotsam that occasionally rises to the top.

Unfortunately - one can't really leave GMail until others leave as well, in that Google will still have a copy of all of our email exchange with people who still use GMail.

It doesn't matter whether Google thinks we're stupid or not - it's always thought we are suckerds, and to a great extent, we are.

Anyway, friends shouldn't let friends use GMail. Try any number of email service providers. I personally like Proton Mail (https://proton.me/mail) as far as privacy-minded webmail goes, but it doesn't have to be, nor should it be, one provider for everyone.

Sometimes it finds "misspellings" where I wrote a correctly spelled word but not the one I intended, because it understands context. Sometimes it legitimately makes the sentence clearer.

And sometimes its suggestion turns the message from a warm and friendly email into a cold strictly-business email. Those are the ones I usually ignore.

EditUpdate: After reading another comment, this must have been a bunch of "smart features" which gmail suggested a while ago. I just, as I said, refused all of them. So they're available in Settings somewhere. Find, turn off.

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 follows to start with a custom domain? Do people use redirection? Is that effective? What happens when an email is redirected from Gmail to my new host, and I want to keep replying without the recipients thinking I've changed email? If you do that, is it even worth switching, given you have to keep your Gmail account?

That is the more interesting part of these stories to me than which host people move to.

This is all a solution looking for a problem, pretending that people don’t have time to read or write their own email.

With both Google search and email Google is willing to replace reality with uncertain pseudo-reality. I find it extraordinary.

Just don't use the Gmail interface. Use your own mail reader.

Don't conflate "Gmail the UI" with "Gmail the mail provider".

Having said this - I never used Gmail for anything serious - I had my own domain + mail etc since before Gmail existed, and the reason was I got tired of "free" tools making my life miserable.

Adults shouldn’t use gmail. I think less of people who do.

The really, really scary thing is how uncommon this approach is. I think.

My assumption is that most people roll with automated pre-written reply. Maybe tweaking a few things here and there, but ultimately preferring the all-too-convenient trade-off of the robots having written something close enough to what they wanted to say, using "better" words. Even when what they would have written themselves would have had some personality, even if it was their own flawed human one.

For the record, I am 100% with you on your approach (on the odd occasion that I must use gmail).

I have left Gmail (everything Google, really, that was the last one) years ago when they went back on their word of grandfathered lifetime access to a free email inbox with a custom domain. They did go back on that going back near the end of the deadline, but by then I had already deleted my account.

I switched to iCloud+, because it was the cheapest option I found (0.99€/month) and it includes other niceties such as 50GB iCloud Drive storage, iCloud Private Relay, and Hide My Email. So far, no regrets. It may not have all the features of other email hosts, but it’s enough for my needs and the price with the extras make up for it.

Even for your own business and product, you would focus on serving the category of user from where bulk of your revenue would come from. And your fringe users would feel they are not cared for. That's what is happening.

We have to remember that when Gmail was released, email providers were stingy on storage and decent web mail was unheard of.

Now, if you run over to a paid alternative like FastMail you’ll actually have a faster/better webmail experience.

I also think everyone should use email on their own domain so that it’s easy to kick your provider to the curb if they go downhill. As long as you own the domain you can do whatever you want.

Does it do this animation every time you try to compose a new message, or is it just the first time you are given the button?

(I couldn't simply look at my own gmail to see, because I tried that but mine does not have it. I'm guessing it is either something they are gradually rolling out or it is something only for people who are paying for Google services).

regardless if you aim to switch to a self-hosted one, it might look like this anyway.

switching emails is as annoying as changing phone numbers as you need to update it across everything in your life, digital or otherwise.

I'm just now migrating away from gmail for a different kind of inanity[1] all the same.

1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48367950

    I focus the message body area and underneath my cursor appears
    the message “Press / for Help me write”.

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, ungoogled Chromium, Brave and a couple of others I don't recall.

Debating moving over to Fastmail as well

I use LLM to summarize the emails I receive. Now instead of a full page full of graphics and shit, I get one-liners like "$100 charge on your Costco card at X on 1/1/2026 1:35pm"

Also when I click "spam" on a sender, a domain, or an intermediate and the message goes to spam from then on. Not like gmail who I have to click "unsubscribe" and "spam" 100 times and still the email finds it's way to my inbox.

Seems somewhat familiar from somewhere…

I got a new Samsung phone a few months ago (my last phone was showing signs of dying soon, and I'd promised to never touch Xiaomi again). It took a while to convince the two competing sets of GenAI features (Gemini and Bixby, and related features) that if I wanted their help I'd come calling, and until then they should sod off and leave me to do things myself.

Switching away from Gmail isn't possible for me, but I will keep trying, I won't give up but hopefully I would never have to realize how big a mistake this was.

I feel like I might end up on the streets if gmail goes away. Hyperbolic but it's insane how true that feels.

Also, not to be disrespectful to the OP, but seems quite an... overblown reaction. To each their own, though.

I moved to mailbox.org years ago. Pay a few pounds a year for private email with webtools and drive and don't have google snooping my emails and sending me targeted ads.

Not that Mail.app is amazing. It sometimes corrupts its sqlite db (I have 300k+ emails dating back to the late 90s). But it's still way better than the dreadful web interface that only seems to get worse and slower.

I wonder if a minor UI change might help a bit: make it normal to show “approx 15 min read” in the email/whatever interface.

Just some sort of “this is the baseline amount of work you’re asking of the recipient.”

> I go to check my email in Gmail’s web UI.

One of the Google founders (Sergei I think) read the book “nudge” and fell in love with it. What Google product managers fail to realize is that a hard nudge is called a shove. And removing the ability to say no is theft of consent. They continue to do it because it works and there’s nobody left there with enough courage to stop them.

I've never been waterboarded, but I'm pretty sure that if somebody ever waterboarded me I wouldn't drink water for the rest of my life.

I don't mind the "make this clearer" suggestions in email writing, sometimes that does help me. As long as it stays out of my way like a spell checker, and is optional /opt in.

Using AI allows him to feel a lot more confident in what he is writing, particularly when I suggested he tell the LLM tone (friendly and professional) he was wanting.

spam is now nonexistent in my email.

they really don't know how to integrate AI into it at all, and honestly I think a part of that comes down to a little bit of column a and column b. Where column a is that they are constrained by privacy and column b is they are constrained by complete politics driven work cycles that don't allow them to rethink or rework things at all or try things out.

I'm pretty sure to do a single change it requires 50 coordination calls with like 5 different executive levels 8 kpi alignment meetings 6 product managers in varying different rooms 3 different user group studies and finally after all that you might be able to ship something but it's nothing close to what you or the user originally wanted.

such is the way of "startups"

In the margins: the user.

Increasingly, it tries to tie your phone number to your accounts. Fair enough, problems with fake accounts and all that, I don't like it but I understand it.

However, the prompt is invariably "Let us verify it's you. Please enter your phone number:" or something along those lines. With that, you don't verify that it's me. You just verify that someone has a phone number. It's for your protection, not for my protection. Don't patronise me.

I find this infuriating. I have my own voice, my own writing style, and I deliberately use some "bad" writing tropes for effect. For any non-trivial amount of writing (read: anything with actual paragraphs), I'm liable to spend as much time editing as I am writing out the first draft, to make sure my writing conveys the message I want it to.

"Tab to improve" is, effectively, "tab to delete my own personality".

I've used gmail for corpo email since, but I don't have a choice there.

For all the amazing creative work carefully (or not) crafted by humans directly, you’d rather have the derived token sausage?

Writing with intent to deceive a human, and otherwise generating ‘art’ with models is the laziest application thereof, and I’d argue it’s unethical. If you generate something and present it to me as your own work, worthy of direct human consumption and thus, my finite human heartbeats, I instantly have a problem with you.

Email in perfuckingticular: if your actual reply is “yep, meet you there!” And you ask the LLM to expand it and bloat it in some way, what’s the justification?

It sounds like they use plenty of software so they must be incredibly lucky, picky, or both.

What used to be instantaneous (like, opening an email) now takes seconds.

Google, what happened to you?

B. If one’s using a free mail service for 16 years, and then came to not liking its recent development, in which world shitting on it in public is the right and necessary thing to do?

C. In which world someone switching mail provider is a top front page news item?

D. If the case in B is not free, then this means the OP was heavier user than my teenage daughter. Thus consumed more of it.

The problem is that they don't offer a way for you to say "no, thank you, I'll write my own emails", because they are dumping so much money into this thing and if people don't want to use it they can't justify feeding the token machine.

You can turn a lot of this stuff off by having a Google Cloud account and using their "business-class" product, which gives you the power to turn off these features (most of them, anyway) for your "employees". I'm already doing that because I use Google for a bunch of stuff, but if I wasn't, I might switch away from Gmail as well.

Google, if you’re listening, the only thing I need in the cleanup tool is a sort all mails by size option. That’s it. Just put the biggest one on top and sort down from there.

Frankly, I've always hated the Gmail web UI, so I never use it. Not in the 22 years I've had a Gmail account.

IMHO, Superhuman gets a ton right... A Superhuman clone (maybe in VIM or Emacs) would be ideal if you don't want the AI features or the $40/month fee. Don't even need to change your mail address, since it connects to Gmail.

to where?

This, I think, is the part that irks me the most. Companies adding token-usage-KPIs for engineering is one thing, but when they have to resort to deliberately tricking users into using their slop-generators.. something has gone very wrong, and they're trying very, very hard to make it seem like it's not so.

My personal pet peeve is Copilot in Teams. Did you know, if you turn off Copilot in Teams at an org level, it disables meeting recording entirely? Ignoring that meeting recording has been a core feature dating way back before Copilot-anything, I can't fantom any possible reason why recording a video of a meeting would require an LLM. Transcription, maybe I could see, but that feature is easily togglable with or without Copilot. But if you want to record a meeting, for whatever reason, you need to have Copilot on.

Shenanigans like this is why user counts for LLM features should always be taken with a grain of salt.

Along with the author I also have zero doubt google maliciously disables non-GenAI features under that toggle to coerce people into enabling the slop features as well. Google being google, I fully expect them to remove that option entirely in the future, forcing all users to wade through useless slop. That'll be the impetus for me to finally get off of gmail once and for all.

There is no guarantee today that any software manufacturer will not slap AI whenever, wherever they can.

I want stuff to work like linux commands. Do one thing well. Work well with other processes over a standard protocol.

If you ever find a good email client @speckx let me know. Something that does not get in my way, can work on mac/windows/iphone/android, can work offline, can do basic things like search predictably (I'm look at you apple mail) and (FFS!) does not show me random unread badges on folders where everything is already read (You again, apple mail).

It feels almost like these companies have too many devs just cramming in features to justify their existence & year end performance review, rather than considering whether it is an actual improvement to the user's use case.

Gmail is also starting to really get on my nerves with their enshitified UI. Every button looks different (presumably each "owned" by someone else). It's full of popup overlays you need to click away to get to the interface. On iphone 1/3rd of my inbox real estate is currently a banner about data sharing controls?

I just want to write emails guys...

I've been using email through a client for decades. My primary email is Gmail, but I have no idea what Gmail is like on the web these days. Save for providers like hey.com, whose entire selling point is their unique web UX, I never understood why would someone use email in their web browser.

Huh, really? The message I take from Google’s AI fetish is that Google is _desperate_ to push this stuff on people so that they can show use and make it look like less of an expensive failure. It’s kind of comical at this point; you can’t use a Google thing without being bombarded with pleading to use Gemini.

This, I absolutely hate it. And like the author said, it must be intentional, so that someone at Google can show the usage numbers and get a promotion.

I like the nuance my words convey, Google.

I don't need to sound like an LLM with no sense of personality. My phrasing is chosen very deliberately to draw a very precise picture. I don't appreciate you trying to blur it.

Unfortunately, I’m not up for learning a completely new set of keyboard shortcuts anymore and alot doesn’t provide a nice interface either, so i don’t use it much more.

But the enshittification of mail is dismaying.

I mean… this is probably true for a great number of people. Perhaps the majority and they are statistically correct to assume.

But yes, fuck Gmail pushing this shit so hard by default.

Also known as Promo-Driven Culture

(But yes, AI features are annoying and intrusive at times.)

The PM (I know her) is juicing her results, that's all.

With pressure from her bosses and ultimately the CEO to show 'usage' in AI to raise $80B of capital (debt) to build more datacenter.

Unfortunately, those are the incentives of the system.

P.S. No offense to anyone involved - I wouldn't wish the bureaucracy inside Google to make a product change upon anyone. You've used (or tried) to use their cloud products right?

1. Someone links this post in an internal Slack-like app to relevant PMs and designers.

2. Someone in leadership respond "dang we should look at this deluge of CTAs". In doing this they pretend as though it's new information that people didn't have until now, since that avoids anyone being responsible, even though every single engineer and the designers that still have their idealism are full aware of it.

3. Some PM is assigned a project of cleaning up CTAs, which they half-heartedly do, and the situation is slightly better afterwards, although nobody is accountable or really cares and the same problem will happen again for the next round of launches, since everyone's OKRs are tied to getting users NOW and CTAs that stupid people click on / random people accidentally click on are the best way to drive a metric in the near future. Somehow they manage to spin the cleanup as a positive and wholesome metric-moving project instead of what it is, which is doing extra work to fix other peoples' negligence.

4. Nothing like introspection happens because the org is entirely driven by short-sighted metric-maximization. It continues to gradually rot, losing the engineers and designers who care about the users, with the main decision-making roles turned over every couple years so pointless pms and managers can stick stars on their resume.

5. In a few years when the accumulation of misanthropic decisions starts to actually affect metrics in a way that nobody can easily bandaid, some executive will start a new project to do something about modernizing the whole app. A bunch of people will ship things to clean it up, and a new design will launch with a bunch of user studies that validate it as better. It will almost certainly be worse, but nobody cares, they just need work to do, and they'll massage the metrics to make it good enough until they can switch roles again.

6. At no point will the organization be capable of anything like shame, which is a shame because that is what is needed: someone in charge has to believe in doing things because they are good for the users and not for mindless metric-moving, and hold those under them accountable accordingly. Instead we get this, which is basically the long-term symptoms of going public in an industry where user growth and retention are not very quickly correlated with changes in the product. As a result bad product changes alienate users slowly and there is little incentive to make good changes, because neither result affects anything in the next few quarters. So instead you get this bullshit: because it's an easy way to hit OKRs and get promoted, and people's bosses have no reason to disagree because it's a cheap way for them to hit OKRs and get promoted also. Not that they're wrong. When the goal of the company is mindless optimization instead of anything socially positive, maybe this is truly what optimal behavior looks like. Although you can be sure that internal messaging nevertheless focuses on how socially positive the changes are. Gotta keep the illusion going so nobody realizes their job is shameful.

Or maybe that won't happen. But ... I've been around this cycle a few times, at companies who inherited Google's contemptible style of management. Somehow feels like I've seen this before.

Always wild to hear people say stuff like this. First, all user-hostility is clearly disrespectful by definition. Second, almost all software, even the free stuff, is insanely user-hostile. We are all so completely frog-boiled on this it's not even funny. Yes, even people in tech and maybe especially people in tech.

Everyone reading this has probably used 10 applications today that are completely ignoring instructions to disable updates/telemetry if they even bothered to lie to you that this is possible. IOS has years-old "bugs" where turning off voice control isn't actually possible, official docs are gas-lighting you, and the settings are just ignored.. so people just deal with paused music that inconsistently triggers on 1/5 of your sneezes or coughs and get used to it. Spotify performance/ux/sanity has been completely degraded for months now. Web-browsers routinely force updates to require multi-gig downloads of AI models, and before that, they had on-and-off regressions in basic stuff like copy/paste for multiple years. Your popup-blocker that helps you to stay sane feels fine about popping up some shit that tells you how many pop-ups it freaking blocked. This is just my last 10 minutes. You can dig into any one of these problems, lose 45m on some janky fix, and also know for sure that you'll need to spend the same effort on some related goddamned problem less than a week later.

Besides the "ads for paying customers" type of stuff, this drip-drip of millions and millions of little points of persistent friction never stops. You think you broke it or you are going crazy until you deep-dive the bug reports or the reddit threads and realize it's all gas-lighting, and someone has made a choice. If the choice wasn't about disrespectful surveillance, auto-updates, or profit-maxxing enshittification then it's a greenhorn developer refactoring something for devx or aesthetics over UX, and the breakage didn't even happen in service of a real feature.

You try to freeze the apps with snap or containers or whatever for some stability hoping to GTFO the fix-it-again treadmill. You assert proudly that "Computers work for me, I don't work for them!" It's smoother for a while but there's always something. A phone-home with a suddenly bad endpoint, a missing remote tag/version gets yanked, or the operating system itself will betray you with yet-another iteration of unnecessary path-changing nonsense that breaks everything anyway.

Although they are opposites in every other way, Linus and Bezos may be the last living bosses that valued stability, backwards compatibility, and not fucking up shit that works fine. When they are gone god help us all.

Sure using the mysteriously free webmail client of that ad-company may be convenient, but the people who have to interact with you (or with whom you chose to interact) did maybe not make that choice. Forcing on them is not only rude, it should be illegal.

I am not saying you need to run your own mailserver (although I do, mailcow is great), but maybe paying for an email service that respects your another peoples privacy makes sense in a world where a single email is the key to your kingdom.

And I say that because AI that writes responses has to read your mails first. I am sure Google won't use that gathered information for any other purpose than suggesting a reply. /s

I might be in the minority but to me email is an annoying requirement to reach out to people, and that is not due to the AI tools, it's due to: thread management, the horrible noise of unasked for newsletter, and system messages and updates I theoretically do care about but that are just inconsistently formatted and badly listed. I welcome AI giving me a better overview over what's going on than what I myself have.