> My email is now being hosted by Microsoft, [...] Then I guess it's off to Switzerland ( https://proton.me/about );
I am all for moving away from Gmail, but I think this is completely the wrong way to do it. Why go through the hassle of changing your @gmail for @microsoft (or whatever it is?), already thinking about moving to @proton.me in the future?
Get your own domain, and then you won't depend on the service provider anymore. Try Proton, or Fastmail, or Migadu, whatever you want. Once you own your domain, you can change every year while keeping the same email address (e.g. me@m24tom.com)!
Note: I won't accept "it's too hard to setup a domain" from someone who spent more time writing a blog post than it would take to learn how to do it.
nosioptar 22 hours ago [-]
First time I set up a domain with purelymail only took me about 15 minutes. It was nothing more than copy/pasting some values into DNS records and selecting the record type purelymail said to use for said values.
nunez 13 hours ago [-]
Moving to Fastmail from Gmail workspace was an excellent decision. Could not have been easier and I get proper push email in the Apple client.
dmtroyer 4 hours ago [-]
iCloud is also a decent option. Works well for me.
IndySun 56 minutes ago [-]
How long have you been using iCloud for email? Has it been a long time (decade or so), and/or is that email for work/serious stuff, or casual use? Or both? I find it has gone from awful to patchy. But decent is pushing it. I use it casually/newsletters etc..
DavideNL 4 hours ago [-]
Sure, move from one Big Tech monopolist to the next...
woleium 17 hours ago [-]
google hosts 1/4 of all emails. They will probably have most of your email anyway
goku12 14 hours ago [-]
They never said anything about keeping their messages away from Google. It's about having some agency.
One fine morning, you'll find yourself locked out of your gmail account and every other Google service because they just decided that something you said isn't politically correct. You'll also be locked out of any external thrid-party services that rely on Google's OAuth service, email 2FA or verification. You'll never find any help to restore any of that, except to write a whiny blog post and hope that it goes viral on HN or something. It's not an indignity you want to live with.
Another scenario is Google changing their ToS or their service degrading (especially like their really bad spam filters these days). You don't really have a choice of migrating, because you'll have to change your email address as well.
That doesn't happen when you have your own domain. If they do something wrong, you just take your domain to another provider. And all these are worth doing while your gmail is still active, because it will take a few months to migrate your third-party services and your important correspondences over to your new account.
And finally, I really hate the pervasive argument and attitude on HN in the lines of "They trample on us regardless. Might as well learn to live under their feet". Why do you deny yourself self-respect like this? Even if the odds seem insurmountable, it's worth resisting the tyranny in voice and in action. And your voice is important to other people, even if you don't know it. Your defeatist attitude can influence them as much as your relentless defiance can. Choose how you want to influence the society.
woleium 3 hours ago [-]
I think it’s more about picking your battles.
I don’t use google oauth, prefer user pass and email
I use google for email and docs, it’s convenient. i use my own domain though, and i backup my data nightly.
I feel like i have de-risked the relationship as much as is reasonable and am happy to move if i have to with minimal data or access loss (time to restore all data somewhere may be a bit of an issue, but there are workarounds)
soraminazuki 11 hours ago [-]
Except it's not the '00s anymore and most emails don't come from personal gmail accounts. Almost every single email that people receive are automated ones that come from corporations.
woleium 3 hours ago [-]
Google Workspace + Microsoft 365 together around 95% of hosted corporate seats.
Total people using email (2024–2025): about 4.5–4.6 billion.
Google (Gmail consumer + Google Workspace): ≈3.0 billion active users/mailboxes.
numbers from perplexity, but probably good enough for casual conversation
pveierland 23 hours ago [-]
Just disabled the "Smart features" setting in Gmail. Disabling this feature force-disables these other settings:
- Grammar
- Spelling
- Auto-correct
Pretty dark UX to force users into an all AI or nothing situation.
PS1: Yes, I've paid for Google One for years and I'm not just a free user.
PS2: Yes, these features are entirely possible to provide without training on your specific user data.
nunez 13 hours ago [-]
These don't disable Gemini. You can disable it completely if you pay for Workspace, but you can also use a Hide Gemini extension to hide most pop-ups and nags.
xigoi 9 hours ago [-]
It used to be that you had to buy a premium version of software to get more features, now you have to buy the premium version to disable features you don’t want…
hebejebelus 23 hours ago [-]
Since we're all posting about our favourite email provider, Purelymail has been one of my best discoveries of the last year or so. Ten dollars a year (though it's expected that price will go up) for as many mailboxes as you like. There's a webmail too in case you don't want your own IMAP client. I migrated every email I had (except an unmigrateable @gmail.com) to Purelymail over Christmas and I couldn't be happier.
nosioptar 22 hours ago [-]
I've had purelymail for several years. I've only had to contact support once. They responded within an hour and fixed the problem as well.
I've helped nontechnical people move to purelymail as well, they all love it.
witweb 23 hours ago [-]
Purelymail is really good. I've been using it for over 4 years now and haven't had any issues around deliverability or availability. It might not be fancy but it has almost any feature you'd want.
odie5533 23 hours ago [-]
I migrated to Purelymail around the same time! It's working great for me. Unlimited domains, unlimited users, easy to setup. I'm slowly moving all my accounts over to my own domain.
reddalo 23 hours ago [-]
I also love Purelymail. I love the fact that it's so cheap, but that also scares me, because I know it can't last forever.
shishcat 21 hours ago [-]
The issue tracker seems kinda dead... for the rest, it's a good provider
tklenke 5 hours ago [-]
It's a bit unfortunate that this turned into a discussion of email hosting alternatives. The real scream in to the void is the force feeding of AI into places were it's not wanted by the user. Also missed is the discussion of is it okay to use or personal information to train models. It's one thing to scrape this discussion (it's public) To me it's another to scrape my personal conversations... I trust Google, MSFT, AMZN to more or less do their best to keep information private (e.g. Google Voice, Alexa) But once it's in a model, they have no idea what can leak out.
puttycat 24 hours ago [-]
I have more than 20 years of email in my gmail account.
How do I even start migrating?
And even if I migrate, I will need to keep my address alive and forwarding to my new address at least for a few years. So no privacy gains there either.
Does anyone have concrete advice as to how to make the transition?
chias 23 hours ago [-]
My gmail address was also almost exactly 20 years old when I migrated two years ago. Here's how I did it:
--
1. Register your domain (if you're doing that) and get fastmail set up -- I remember feeling a physical discomfort clicking "register" on fastmail, it felt like such an insanely impossible thing to do.
2. Set up the IMAP link so that anything sent to your gmail gets delivered to fastmail. Doing so also allows you to send email from your gmail address (with valid spf/dkim) if you want to.
3. Import all your old mail using fastmail's import tool, which Just Works.
4. Set up a vacation autoresponder in gmail that responds only to people in your contacts with a note telling them your new address.
5. Set up a label and filter in fastmail for anything that was addressed to your gmail, so you can easily see what is still sending you email on your old address to assist with migrating services.
--
It worked a charm. I was completely convinced of it within a week, long before the 30 day free trial ran out. I have been an immensely happy customer since then. Could not imagine going back.
realaaa 18 hours ago [-]
this is the way ! thanks for that, still on my list also, even though I know all the steps, it's just .. daunting
chias 12 hours ago [-]
Yeah, I feel that. But I promise you, within one week I had one single regret: that I had not done this years ago.
Also, I very much recommend using your own domain. It greatly eases the feeling of having to commit, because your email address is not tied to your provider. That is, if you ever decide fastmail is not for you, next time the switch will be invisible to everyone else.
g947o 23 hours ago [-]
That's what I thought as well, until I actually started migrating. I learned a few things:
* You probably don't have that many accounts associated with the email, actually. I have about 50 accounts that I care about enough to move, which took me a morning, but it's doable.
* For the same reason, you probably don't have that many (real human) contacts as well. But I could be very wrong. For me, I still occasionally use Gmail to communicate with a few people (like every two months), but that's infrequent enough that I don't care about how bad Gmail is.
* You probably want to review which services you don't regularly use any more, and if you don't have precious data stored with them (you probably shouldn't), consider closing the account instead of changing the email address, if that's an option for the provider.
* You can of course keep checking the original inbox or do forwarding. My experience is that, very quickly, I only need to occasionally check the old email. I still get a few useful emails here and there, but it's manageable. (Plus emails that remind me I should just delete the account)
You can do it.
sodapopcan 24 hours ago [-]
> I will need to keep my address alive and forwarding to my new address at least for a few years. So no privacy gains there either.
Ya, there's no way of not letting google know what your new address is, but you're going to be emailing a lot of gmail addresses anyway so there's no way around that, really. But with the forwarding they only know incoming mail.
I switched off gmail 3.5 years ago and all I can say is that it wasn't anywhere near as scary as I thought it would be. I setup an auto-responder that would hound people to update their contacts for me and slowly switched over services I cared about (and closed others!) An important point, though, is that I don't really care about old emails. I do still have access to my gmail account, of course, but I have yet to go back. Surely there is a way to export everything and import it into something searchable, though?
sph 23 hours ago [-]
Fastmail migration takes about 20 seconds, and you can use your gmail identity from the Fastmail web app.
nicholasjarnold 24 hours ago [-]
Fastmail provides an easy way to migrate [0]. I setup a label in my Fastmail account that will tag all mail coming in from Gmail. Then you go through that list at your leisure and make the requisite contact with the people or services emailing at the old address. It's really not difficult at all. I've been on Fastmail for ~4 years now, and haven't once considered looking back or regretted it. Good luck.
Exactly this! After ~3 years I rarely receive an email with the Gmail tag now that all contacts/services have been switched over (or unsubscribed). Fastmail is easily my most valued paid service, and yet I never have to think about it. Just works very well.
pan69 19 hours ago [-]
Another happy Fastmail user here. Other than for email, great perks of Fastmail are that it lets me mount my own domain(s) for email and I can even host simple static websites for those domains.
samieljabali 23 hours ago [-]
Wrote an article[0] on how to migrate away from Gmail a few years back. Hope it helps!
Do you really need for the old emails to be "in an account" to make sense of them? Google lets you just download an archive that can be loaded in a local mail reader.
arrsingh 24 hours ago [-]
I was in the same boat as you. I tried Fastmail and they have a really great tool that just did it. I was skeptical but after I tried it was very pleased. Give it a shot.
marcd35 23 hours ago [-]
are you only using the web based version?
A dedicated client like Mozilla's Thunderbird might be helpful for de-cluttering.
Notion Mail also seems like it has potential - ability to group together certain types of mail.
Someone already recommended Google Takeout to back up all your mail, then finding a business email host that can easily import your data
bryogenic 24 hours ago [-]
- Start with takeout
- Setup automatic forwarding
- Then probably just use that old email for searching old emails
This has worked okay for me
surgical_fire 23 hours ago [-]
I think it depends on what you use your email for.
Basically all email I get is from accounts created on services. Almost never it is an email from a real person.
The ones that matter I have been migrating to Proton (e.g.: bank, utilities, etc).
throw7 1 days ago [-]
"My email is now being hosted by Microsoft..."
Out of the pan, into the fire.
my recommendation: i've been happily using fastmail for years.
ntoskrnl_exe 23 hours ago [-]
I tried using Hotmail as my primary for a while a few years ago and I've never seen more legitimate mail being entirely dropped with no explanation. It would never reach the inbox, it wouldn't be in the junk folder, it was as if the other party had never even sent it, despite assuring me they had. Never had that happen with Gmail or really any other mail service out there.
publicdebates 24 hours ago [-]
Have you considered using AWS WorkMail? Very easy to set up, even helps you with MX/DKIM/DMARC/SPF if you use Route53, and only $4/month/user I believe. Granted, you won't get anywhere near Google's level of automatic credibility, but even that is relatively low for young gmail accounts.
cui 23 hours ago [-]
I thought it's meant for business usage. Why are you interested in WorkMail compared to other million email products?
veqq 23 hours ago [-]
> $4/month/user
My VPS host lets me use hundreds of emails for like $7/month besides the actual hosting. Of course, Microsoft charges even more for a single...
andrewchilds 24 hours ago [-]
Maybe it’s just me, but I have serious issue with Fastmail’s spam filtering. Meaning, it seems that I am the spam filter. I find myself considering closing the account on a regular basis because of it.
I am also extremely frustrated with Gmail’s AI features now being apparently impossible to disable.
sph 24 hours ago [-]
> Fastmail’s spam filtering
I had issues with it early on, and after some back and forth with support they explained to me what is going on: it takes about 200 spam emails before your personalized filter kicks in, before that you might see something slip through. Also, the spam filter updates after you delete emails from your spam folder. Just remember to empty your spam folder, and add some custom rules until you reach that 200 threshold.
5+ years in, everything is working great, nothing to complain, best email provider I've ever used. I only wish they had servers in the EU.
aeurielesn 23 hours ago [-]
This has been my number one request for fastmail for years. They're happy with GDPR compliance but no intentions of having EU servers.
rationalist 24 hours ago [-]
Fastmail's spam filter has been better than Gmail's spam filter in my experience.
tamimio 24 hours ago [-]
Thier spam filter is really great, probably only one time they flagged a legit email as a spam. On the other hand, the email I have that uses fastmail never ended in someone’s spam.
ziml77 24 hours ago [-]
Seconding Fastmail here.
Microsoft is an insane choice, just look at what they've done with Windows and their Office suite.
vondur 23 hours ago [-]
Pretty much lost me at that point.
autoexec 24 hours ago [-]
Yeah I laughed when I saw he'd moved to MS, but I'd love to get some more alternatives.
My ISP has already said they're going to stop providing email service at some point in the near future and I'll have to migrate at some point.
In the past I'd picked up a cheap domain and self-hosted for a bit, but I'd love to not have to. Any good email providers out there that actually respect their customers and support IMAP?
input_sh 23 hours ago [-]
Purchase a domain and point the MX record(s) to any provider you'd like. If you end up not liking that provider, you simply point the domain to a different one.
That's the main advantage of not using the provider's domain as a part of your email address (like @gmail.com, @outlook.com or whatever).
drcongo 23 hours ago [-]
I moved my personal email from Google a few years ago to https://inbox.eu which was by far the cheapest option for mailboxes for the whole family on custom domains etc. They've been very solid, I have no regrets. Their spam filtering has been a little hit and miss but other than that, solid.
It looks like inbox.eu does sell your data and/or use it to push personalized ads. If I'm paying for something I don't want ads and I'd really prefer that whoever I pay weren't reading my personal mail for things to use against me.
goodpoint 24 hours ago [-]
"My email is now being hosted by Microsoft..."
Please tell me this is parody.
NoboruWataya 22 hours ago [-]
My tips from moving away from Gmail:
- Mailbox.org is what I use and it's pretty good. I often see Fastmail recommended too.
- Use a standalone email client that allows you to connect to multiple email servers. This makes it easy to continue to monitor your old email account while you use the new one. I use Thunderbird on desktop and FairEmail on Android (though Thunderbird also has an app for Android).
- Transfer all of your most important accounts over initially. As long as you continue to have access to your old account, you don't need to transfer absolutely everything all at once, you can do it over time.
- Use a custom domain name so if you decide to change providers again in future you just need to update your DNS records rather than changing your email address in all your accounts.
- You may also want to set up a catch-all email address or use a service like https://addy.io/ to generate email aliases on the fly, and create a new alias for each service you use (for example, your email for GitHub could be github.com@mydomain.com). This helps protect your actual personal email address from spam.
throwaway2056 1 days ago [-]
> I tried turning off Smart Features and oh my, that's not usable.
Why? What did it do?
This is the problem. Overload. It is not a google problem. If you get 200 emails - even without AI - just by using Thunderbird or k9mail (android) it will be a problem.
I cannot find that "Messages and attachments might be reviewed by humans, so don't share any sensitive or confidential information."
anywhere.
Of course, there is nothing wrong about changing the provider. Variety is good.
B1FIDO 1 days ago [-]
I had Smart Features enabled for years. Years! They worked okay. They put good accurate stuff on my calendar and so there was useful work being done by the AI in background.
Unfortunately, in the past few months, Gemini AI really started shoving its way in. And there were some features that were really unpalatable, that were basically dealbreakers for this. Yeah, I believe the "AI Summaries" had a lot to do with it. They were bad, misleading, and I did not want them crowding up my app.
I couldn't disable those features without disabling Smart Features entirely. So that's what I did.
So now I sort of suffer without the automatic email event-calendar integrations, and the other cool stuff that AI had provided, but it's totally usable. I have no trouble using it as an email service with that AI disabled. It works fine.
Anyway, it is no secret that Google has always used the text of our emails for their own marketing and analysis purposes. Always has. Why did you think Gmail was a free service? Obviously, you were paying for it! We all paid for it with our email content!
tim333 9 hours ago [-]
I've been a gmail user without smart features for years. I'm guessing the 'not usable' was too much junk drowning out important messages. The answer usually is spending 5 minutes clicking 'unsubscribe' on the stuff you are not bothered about.
arrsingh 24 hours ago [-]
I moved my custom domain from google workspace to fastmail a few years ago and didn't look back. Very happy with that decision.
The only two downsides:
1. A few people have reported my emails from fastmail (calendar invites mostly) going to their spam folder. Not enough reports so I'm not worried.
2. Google won't let me sign in and create / edit /comment in google docs with my custom email hosted at fastmail so I have to have a random@gmail.com account just to use free google docs to collaborate with people who only send me google docs.
Overall I think AI features are going to be great but give me the ability to pick and choose which I enable / disable and we should be good. If not then I agree with OP - Bye Bye Gmail.
oh, and don't read my emails and protect my privacy google! - no? Ok bye bye!
nine_k 24 hours ago [-]
OK, while I briefly have a bit of your attention: what would you advise to use instead? What I need:
* Server-side filters.
* Tags. No, not folders. Many of my emails have 2-3 tags, some have 4-5. I wonder if it can even map to IMAP4; I see a few ways to model it.
* Good deliverability.
* Reasonable spam protection.
* Not hugely expensive. Ideally near-free, or self-hosted.
What are some options?
sph 23 hours ago [-]
I've been spamming enough about Fastmail (just a happy user), it ticks all your boxes except near-free/self-hosted.
Re: tags, you can switch between classic folders or Gmail-style labels.
Re: filtering, it has an easy-to-use UI but you can write your own custom Sieve filtering rules if you want.
em-bee 22 hours ago [-]
is there any FOSS based webmail and/or IMAP that supports tagging instead of folders?
i use supmua (which inspired notmuch) which like gmail uses tags instead of folders. i could not go back to a folder based system. but i am really missing a webmail interface that works with tags.
eviks 14 hours ago [-]
> * Tags. No, not folders.
Why not both?
CrzyLngPwd 23 hours ago [-]
I have had gmail for decades.
The best thing I did recently was turn off the smart features, add a bunch of filters, and unsubscribe from stuff I was no longer interested in.
It was initially a shock to see so many emails I hadn't cared for, but an hour of curation, and it has been a delight ever since.
reddalo 23 hours ago [-]
I did the same, turning off all AI and smart features (including those Primary/Social/Promotion tabs) made Gmail so much better.
I'm planning to move to another service provider though. I can't trust Google anymore.
lzy 21 hours ago [-]
I’ve been running CheapestEmailHosting.com - email hosting for custom domains without enterprise pricing.
SMTP/IMAP/POP3, webmail (Roundcube), CalDAV/CardDAV, unlimited mailboxes, catch-all. Starting at $5/year for 2GB.
No marketing spend, and I terminate spammers immediately. If you run a legitimate domain, you subsidize yourself.
This isn’t for bulk senders or SLAs. It’s for developers and side-project founders who can configure their own clients and don’t want to pay $60-120/year.
Awhile ago when I logged in to my gmail account I was asked if I wanted to try AI summaries, I clicked "no" and nothing has changed in my user experience in either the web interface or mobile apps. It also told me I could that I could enable or disable AI features with the Gemini icon next to the settings icon, which it looks like I can still do, at least in the web interface. Am I missing something?
Being "an early adopter" is not proof of anything other than being an early adopter.
hk1337 23 hours ago [-]
I've been using Fastmail for several years now, I remember when I first said something about it on here I got a negative response about how Fastmail doesn't do something correctly or something, and now most of the comment replies are praising Fastmail. I still like it, it's just interesting how fickle things are here.
> My email is now being hosted by Microsoft, so hopefully will be free of the outages
Ironically Microsoft just had an outage a couple of days ago.
Foorack 24 hours ago [-]
Both me and partner switching to Infomaniak (also Swiss), can recommend. Not E2E encrypted, but kMail is more usable than ProtonMail (also a lot cheaper on all levels).
Been using ProtonMail for 5 years but so annoying I can't propely search my emails because of the encryption, can't use standard IMAP without a proprietary connector, and their Drives/Docs suite is missing a lot of features.
whyagaindavid 24 hours ago [-]
Account creation needs phone number?
snowchaser 22 hours ago [-]
As a PSA, the Google Workspace version of gmail doesn’t train on your data, if you like other gmail/workspace features.
Section 12.11 of the Workspace specific terms confirms that Google will not train on customer data(which Gmail emails in workspace are). Incidentally, this is where Generative prompts and responses submitted or created via GA versions of Gemini in workspace are identified as “Customer Data”, which is not used for training. https://workspace.google.com/terms/service-terms/
Google Has Most of My Email Because It Has All of Yours
stonogo 22 hours ago [-]
I’m not sure what to do except encourage others to consider, in the wake of the Snowden revelations and everything else, whether you really want Google to have all your email. And half of mine.
Looks like this article and the one you're replying to are in agreement.
coffe2mug 16 hours ago [-]
Many businesses use office365 or Google.
They then have all your email. Fingerprint.
Big tech,.NSA, 5 eyes won the game. No chance unless something truly citizen oriented happens in most countries.
sylens 22 hours ago [-]
I thought this post was building towards talking about switching to self hosted email or Fastmail or Proton, but they went to Microsoft of all places? All of this garbage is coming to Outlook.com sooner or later
josh_s 23 hours ago [-]
Single best thing I've done to get control over my public email:
* add a filter that moves all email with "unsubscribe" into an "unsubscribe" folder
combined with fastmail spam filtering, my inbox actually became usable again instantly...
delduca 23 hours ago [-]
I’ve migrated my main mail account (gmail) to a custom domain on apple’s icloud.
No regrets (since I am a mac & iphone user).
Plus, I can have a email per website, without exposing my main address.
r0b05 24 hours ago [-]
Is it easy and advisable to host your own email server on vps?
alance 19 hours ago [-]
I used to self-host email, it was mostly all initial setup and then it just worked for years. Eventually I got a bit wary about the security side of an internet-accessible box and decided to move the whole thing over to AWS SES. Wrote it up here:
My opinion after self-hosting for over a decade is that, yes, it's easy. See my comment further inside the thread for my take on whether or not it's advisable.
rationalist 24 hours ago [-]
I am no expert, but from what I've read...
Easy: I don't think so.
Advisable: Hell no.
I believe you have to constantly maintain it, and good luck with deliverability.
Anyone: correct me if I'm wrong.
nine_k 24 hours ago [-]
Not an expert, but I suppose that you can safely receive email using a self-hosted SMTP server. Sending it without being blacklisted / greylisted is trickier. If you don't want to muck with obtaining an IPv4 with a good karma, there are options to send via large providers, such as GMail (IIRC free), or AWS SES, or things like Sendgrid or Brevo. The latter may be effectively free if you send only a handful of emails per day.
technothrasher 19 hours ago [-]
I found when I tried out using SES, Sendgrid, Brevo, etc to send emails for my self-hosted exim instance, that my deliverability actually went down compared to sending the mail directly. I believe it was because for the free/low cost tiers they dump you onto IP addresses where they're also playing wack-a-mole with spammers. SMTP2GO was the only one I found that had decent deliverability at a free/low cost for low volumes. Still, I only use it for my personal email. For my business, I host our mail on Fastmail.
daneel_w 23 hours ago [-]
> Anyone: correct me if I'm wrong.
OK: it's easy, unless you're the "atechnical" sort.
Is it recommended? I'm torn here, because the big beasts are systematically spam/junk-classifying and even rejecting e-mail sent from independent MXes despite ticking the right checkboxes (FQrDNS, SPF, DKIM, DMARC) and having a clean IP-address in a tidy network.
ryandrake 23 hours ago [-]
I’ve been self hosting E-mail (send and receive) with SSL and IMAP, for my family and a few hobby clubs on a $5 Linode VPS for at least a decade, probably more. Very few problems over that time period. Basic exim4/dovecot setup. Occasionally some crappy ISP’s spam filter gets too aggressive but I follow their unblocking procedure and am fine from there. I do keep my old empty gmail account around in case that changes but I don’t use it much.
The fear around self hosting seems overblown. LetsEncrypt falls over more often than my E-mail.
alphax314 22 hours ago [-]
I used to do the same for many years woth dovecot as well. Its not too difficult plus now with the llms it can probably be easier to maintain the configuration fires (I havent tried).
However I did have issues with the VPS provider I was using getting blocked and not just my VPS’ IP but the entire block. So at some point it became tok tedious to have to follow the unblock process.
And so I switched to fastmail and have been using it for over two years. No major complaints.
Would I self-host again? If I have the free time I think its fun and you can learn a lot. However, if you have young kids and are too busy with life I would say go with a provider you trust with your data.
sdoering 24 hours ago [-]
I host a few client marketing & transactional mails.
Mostly sending stuff from marketing automation/newsletter software.
Not an issue. Will be migrating the first few domains of off paid google workspace E-Mail to a self hosted solution. I actually don’t expect too much trouble.
But that’s currently still a hypothesis. I have seen a few people do that successfully. So I know it’s possible. Still. Not having hosted a mail infrastructure in 20 odd years…
aleda145 23 hours ago [-]
Been having a custom domain on Proton for almost 10 years now. No issues and I'm happy my Google sceptisism is now paying dividends
mongol 23 hours ago [-]
I have been looking into options too. One option that seemed attractive was called Zoho mail. Any experiences from that?
tianqi 23 hours ago [-]
I've been using it for years and have no complaints. But some people say Zoho can even read your emails by human, I'm not sure if that's true.
stanski 23 hours ago [-]
Been using Zoho for years with no issues. Both via the web interface and IMAP.
I'm on my mail since year BUT the issue is that most mail tools came from another era, nice for us, but not really usable for most people.
My setup include notmuch as MUA, muchsync to have messages via ssh on some machines, MailDrop to auto-refile them and keep my inboxes clean enough. Generally speaking it's not that hard, but the need of many components and the absence of a shiny UI for end users makes their use a no go even for many generic GNU/Linux user.
Most development since to many years is only on WebMails that's the issue.
codingjoe 1 days ago [-]
#di_day #ccc ;)
zahlman 23 hours ago [-]
... What does this mean in the current context?
sodapopcan 1 days ago [-]
It would have been nicer if this was about a general Google boycott in general, but this will do too.
jsnell 21 hours ago [-]
> BUT... now... what they are saying is that... we are going to use your email to train our LLMs.
I feel I'm missing some part of the story. Where are they saying that?
latchkey 24 hours ago [-]
I'm very happy with MimeStream. I get gmail, without the UX of gmail, and something that I can command-tab into, instead of a browser window.
nelsonfigueroa 24 hours ago [-]
Looked up Mimestream. So it's a subscription-based app that basically gives you nicer UI/UX for your google emails. Oof.
otterley 24 hours ago [-]
Only on HN will someone who makes money writing software complain that other fellow developers are asking for money from him for their software.
aesh2Xa1 23 hours ago [-]
No, you probably haven't read the conversation piece. The post is ultimately about switching providers because Google's service crosses a line from (1) targeted advertising to (2) using personal and confidential information for model training.
A service to clean up the UI does nothing to solve the issue at hand.
latchkey 23 hours ago [-]
"I tried to turn it off. I can."
The complaint was about the summary, which Mimestream doesn't include.
aesh2Xa1 23 hours ago [-]
The dealbreaker was data usage for AI training, not UI:
"We are going to use your email to train our LLMs. I'm not okay with that... my confidential commercial information is NOT okay to use to train your models [...] So... goodbye Gmail."
The title is Bye Bye Gmail.
latchkey 22 hours ago [-]
They admit they can turn that off.
nelsonfigueroa 23 hours ago [-]
That is not what my comment is about.
latchkey 23 hours ago [-]
You might want to edit your comment to explain because that was my own takeaway as well.
latchkey 23 hours ago [-]
I agree with your comment fully, but it also doesn't follow the guidelines.
$50/year for a nice app that I use on a daily basis to make my life better? Worth every penny.
noitpmeder 24 hours ago [-]
But google still is presumably still training their AIs on your email content regardless if you don't use their frontend.
latchkey 23 hours ago [-]
OPs issue was more clearly directed at "A week or two ago I was surprised to see a Google Gemini summary at the top of my email on my phone", which Mimestream doesn't include.
The rest of the complaint was about a bug that happened, just today, with sorting and spam control.
noitpmeder 23 hours ago [-]
OP meaning the author of the linked article? Maybe I missed the mark but I felt his main rejection of Gmail ended up being because they train their AI based on his private and or commercial data.
latchkey 23 hours ago [-]
OP = original poster
"I tried to turn it off. I can."
The complaint was about the summary, which Mimestream doesn't include.
tklenke 1 days ago [-]
Recently I was surprised to see a Google Gemini summary at the top of my email on my phone. A day or two later this appeared in my web client as well. Look, I love our new overlords (for the record m'lords I nearly always use please and thank you. I was an early adopter. I still am a frequent user..I mean someone who has all the answers and blows smoke up my ass..perfect right!
Here's the thing. I like to read things from my friends that they have taken the time to write. I personally hate texting. All the nuance is gone. Often the humor. Sad. Makes me want to have a beer with you...eye contact...blech. The LAST thing I want is a summary...at the top of the email...highlighted..that I CANNOT turn off.
I tried to turn it off. I can. It's under `Gmail -> Settings -> General -> Smart Features (checkbox)`. BUT..the AI summaries is now grouped with the Smart Tabs.
For those of you who do not use Gmail Smart Tabs, Smart Tabs (officially the Tabbed Inbox) have been part of Gmail since 2013; well actually the technology behind them—Smart Labels—actually debuted two years earlier. (Thank you Gemini, yes I DO truly love you. Tell me again about the comparisons of Stephen Miller and Heinrich Himmler's tactics please?)
Smart Tabs automatically sort my incoming flood of solicited commercial email (cue laughter from those who know my first start-up) into five buckets:
* Primary: Email from you.
* Promotions: K&L Wine Merchants at the top of the list.
* Social: Hi Andrew on Facebook (that I only log into from Firefox running on a VM).
* Update: Actual transactional emails from companies.
* Forums: The Information at the top of the list (a newsletter I'd like to read but don't want to make the time justify paying for the content).
I tried turning off Smart Features and oh my, that's not usable. So I lived with the AI summary at the top. For a week. Then this morning, I saw several messages in my Primary tab that normally get sorted into Promotions, Social, Updates or Forums. This is not unheard of; sometimes a company uses a new incoming address or something and stuff gets put in the wrong bucket.
But THIS time, I got a popup that says I must "Share" this message with Google and links to the Privacy Policy and Google Terms of Service. And an explicit sentence: "Messages and attachments might be reviewed by humans, so don't share any sensitive or confidential information."
I'm not naive. I'm an early adopter, my email address includes my name and no numbers. I AM a direct marketer. From the get-go, having Google read my email in order to provide targeted advertising was part of the deal. I was fine with that.
BUT...now...what they are saying is that...we are going to use your email to train our LLMs. I'm not okay with that. That knowledge of my way of writing, my personal details, my confidential commercial information is NOT okay to use to train your models. 'Cause I expect mistakes will be made and more information will reside in the model than those at Google (or FB, MSFT etc) intended. And I'm not really up for assuming that risk.
So...goodbye Gmail. It's been great. Really great. I'm sure I'll miss you. Bye.
My email is now being hosted by Microsoft, so hopefully will be free of the outages and limits some of you have experienced with that email in the past. There it will reside until I cannot turn off MSFT's ability to read my email. Then I guess it's off to Switzerland ( [https://proton.me/about](https://proton.me/about) ); my email can be with my gold. JK.
Tom
p.s. why thank you Gemini for reformatting that for me into a clean, engaging markdown blog post. Yes, I do agree this is a sharp, timely take on the "AI-ification" of tools we use every day. I love you. Kill me last?
shawn_w 1 days ago [-]
Other long-time features are now tied to having those stupid summaries enabled too. It's an all or nothing deal. So frustrating and unnecessary.
B1FIDO 23 hours ago [-]
Speaking of botched LLM summaries, my bank has been doing this to me for several months now.
Instead of the transaction info which is strictly defined and uniformly formatted, they've attempted to give "friendly names" to each one and "simplify" the descriptions.
This has been a supremely bad idea. Firstly, it deprives me of essential info about each transaction, which I cannot access at all in the mobile app. I need to go into the website on a desktop computer, click through a few screens to say "this description is incorrect!" and request that they show me the original.
The "simple descriptions" elide a lot of useful info, such as the vendor's phone number.
Sometimes they are completely incorrect, like the name of my church gets a completely different and misleading name in every transaction. I cannot disable this.
Last year, there was a transaction during tax time that I believed to be some sort of penalty by the government, and I was freaking out about it, but it turned out to actually be my refund and had been "helpfully renamed" by my bank to be extremely misleading.
I have discussed these issues with the online support staff, and in person at my branch, and they are sympathetic, but there is nothing they can do about the app, and the only workaround for me is to individually flag each transaction as it comes in, and fix it, and there is no "global disable" or "global unfuck everything" button for any of us, anywhere.
CTOSian 1 days ago [-]
you can use your gmail on zoho, they have some low cost plans
mapontosevenths 1 days ago [-]
How will that prevent google from training AI's on his data?
CTOSian 9 hours ago [-]
no idea, do they really read any darn email on storage, or just when you use their webmail/android app?
Rendered at 20:57:01 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
I am all for moving away from Gmail, but I think this is completely the wrong way to do it. Why go through the hassle of changing your @gmail for @microsoft (or whatever it is?), already thinking about moving to @proton.me in the future?
Get your own domain, and then you won't depend on the service provider anymore. Try Proton, or Fastmail, or Migadu, whatever you want. Once you own your domain, you can change every year while keeping the same email address (e.g. me@m24tom.com)!
Note: I won't accept "it's too hard to setup a domain" from someone who spent more time writing a blog post than it would take to learn how to do it.
One fine morning, you'll find yourself locked out of your gmail account and every other Google service because they just decided that something you said isn't politically correct. You'll also be locked out of any external thrid-party services that rely on Google's OAuth service, email 2FA or verification. You'll never find any help to restore any of that, except to write a whiny blog post and hope that it goes viral on HN or something. It's not an indignity you want to live with.
Another scenario is Google changing their ToS or their service degrading (especially like their really bad spam filters these days). You don't really have a choice of migrating, because you'll have to change your email address as well.
That doesn't happen when you have your own domain. If they do something wrong, you just take your domain to another provider. And all these are worth doing while your gmail is still active, because it will take a few months to migrate your third-party services and your important correspondences over to your new account.
And finally, I really hate the pervasive argument and attitude on HN in the lines of "They trample on us regardless. Might as well learn to live under their feet". Why do you deny yourself self-respect like this? Even if the odds seem insurmountable, it's worth resisting the tyranny in voice and in action. And your voice is important to other people, even if you don't know it. Your defeatist attitude can influence them as much as your relentless defiance can. Choose how you want to influence the society.
I don’t use google oauth, prefer user pass and email
I use google for email and docs, it’s convenient. i use my own domain though, and i backup my data nightly.
I feel like i have de-risked the relationship as much as is reasonable and am happy to move if i have to with minimal data or access loss (time to restore all data somewhere may be a bit of an issue, but there are workarounds)
Total people using email (2024–2025): about 4.5–4.6 billion.
Google (Gmail consumer + Google Workspace): ≈3.0 billion active users/mailboxes.
numbers from perplexity, but probably good enough for casual conversation
- Grammar
- Spelling
- Auto-correct
Pretty dark UX to force users into an all AI or nothing situation.
PS1: Yes, I've paid for Google One for years and I'm not just a free user.
PS2: Yes, these features are entirely possible to provide without training on your specific user data.
I've helped nontechnical people move to purelymail as well, they all love it.
And even if I migrate, I will need to keep my address alive and forwarding to my new address at least for a few years. So no privacy gains there either.
Does anyone have concrete advice as to how to make the transition?
--
1. Register your domain (if you're doing that) and get fastmail set up -- I remember feeling a physical discomfort clicking "register" on fastmail, it felt like such an insanely impossible thing to do.
2. Set up the IMAP link so that anything sent to your gmail gets delivered to fastmail. Doing so also allows you to send email from your gmail address (with valid spf/dkim) if you want to.
3. Import all your old mail using fastmail's import tool, which Just Works.
4. Set up a vacation autoresponder in gmail that responds only to people in your contacts with a note telling them your new address.
5. Set up a label and filter in fastmail for anything that was addressed to your gmail, so you can easily see what is still sending you email on your old address to assist with migrating services.
--
It worked a charm. I was completely convinced of it within a week, long before the 30 day free trial ran out. I have been an immensely happy customer since then. Could not imagine going back.
Also, I very much recommend using your own domain. It greatly eases the feeling of having to commit, because your email address is not tied to your provider. That is, if you ever decide fastmail is not for you, next time the switch will be invisible to everyone else.
* You probably don't have that many accounts associated with the email, actually. I have about 50 accounts that I care about enough to move, which took me a morning, but it's doable.
* For the same reason, you probably don't have that many (real human) contacts as well. But I could be very wrong. For me, I still occasionally use Gmail to communicate with a few people (like every two months), but that's infrequent enough that I don't care about how bad Gmail is.
* You probably want to review which services you don't regularly use any more, and if you don't have precious data stored with them (you probably shouldn't), consider closing the account instead of changing the email address, if that's an option for the provider.
* You can of course keep checking the original inbox or do forwarding. My experience is that, very quickly, I only need to occasionally check the old email. I still get a few useful emails here and there, but it's manageable. (Plus emails that remind me I should just delete the account)
You can do it.
Ya, there's no way of not letting google know what your new address is, but you're going to be emailing a lot of gmail addresses anyway so there's no way around that, really. But with the forwarding they only know incoming mail.
I switched off gmail 3.5 years ago and all I can say is that it wasn't anywhere near as scary as I thought it would be. I setup an auto-responder that would hound people to update their contacts for me and slowly switched over services I cared about (and closed others!) An important point, though, is that I don't really care about old emails. I do still have access to my gmail account, of course, but I have yet to go back. Surely there is a way to export everything and import it into something searchable, though?
[0] https://www.fastmail.com/features/migrate/
[0]: https://sami.eljabali.org/how-to-replace-gmail/
A dedicated client like Mozilla's Thunderbird might be helpful for de-cluttering.
Notion Mail also seems like it has potential - ability to group together certain types of mail.
Someone already recommended Google Takeout to back up all your mail, then finding a business email host that can easily import your data
- Setup automatic forwarding
- Then probably just use that old email for searching old emails
This has worked okay for me
Basically all email I get is from accounts created on services. Almost never it is an email from a real person.
The ones that matter I have been migrating to Proton (e.g.: bank, utilities, etc).
Out of the pan, into the fire.
my recommendation: i've been happily using fastmail for years.
My VPS host lets me use hundreds of emails for like $7/month besides the actual hosting. Of course, Microsoft charges even more for a single...
I am also extremely frustrated with Gmail’s AI features now being apparently impossible to disable.
I had issues with it early on, and after some back and forth with support they explained to me what is going on: it takes about 200 spam emails before your personalized filter kicks in, before that you might see something slip through. Also, the spam filter updates after you delete emails from your spam folder. Just remember to empty your spam folder, and add some custom rules until you reach that 200 threshold.
5+ years in, everything is working great, nothing to complain, best email provider I've ever used. I only wish they had servers in the EU.
Microsoft is an insane choice, just look at what they've done with Windows and their Office suite.
My ISP has already said they're going to stop providing email service at some point in the near future and I'll have to migrate at some point. In the past I'd picked up a cheap domain and self-hosted for a bit, but I'd love to not have to. Any good email providers out there that actually respect their customers and support IMAP?
That's the main advantage of not using the provider's domain as a part of your email address (like @gmail.com, @outlook.com or whatever).
Work email is moving from Google to https://www.infomaniak.com/en/ksuite/ksuite-pro - if you're not bothered about custom domains, they also offer an excellent free tier for personal use: https://www.infomaniak.com/en/ksuite/myksuite
Please tell me this is parody.
- Mailbox.org is what I use and it's pretty good. I often see Fastmail recommended too.
- Use a standalone email client that allows you to connect to multiple email servers. This makes it easy to continue to monitor your old email account while you use the new one. I use Thunderbird on desktop and FairEmail on Android (though Thunderbird also has an app for Android).
- Transfer all of your most important accounts over initially. As long as you continue to have access to your old account, you don't need to transfer absolutely everything all at once, you can do it over time.
- Use a custom domain name so if you decide to change providers again in future you just need to update your DNS records rather than changing your email address in all your accounts.
- You may also want to set up a catch-all email address or use a service like https://addy.io/ to generate email aliases on the fly, and create a new alias for each service you use (for example, your email for GitHub could be github.com@mydomain.com). This helps protect your actual personal email address from spam.
Why? What did it do?
This is the problem. Overload. It is not a google problem. If you get 200 emails - even without AI - just by using Thunderbird or k9mail (android) it will be a problem.
edit: https://support.google.com/mail/answer/15604322?hl=en
I cannot find that "Messages and attachments might be reviewed by humans, so don't share any sensitive or confidential information."
anywhere.
Of course, there is nothing wrong about changing the provider. Variety is good.
Unfortunately, in the past few months, Gemini AI really started shoving its way in. And there were some features that were really unpalatable, that were basically dealbreakers for this. Yeah, I believe the "AI Summaries" had a lot to do with it. They were bad, misleading, and I did not want them crowding up my app.
I couldn't disable those features without disabling Smart Features entirely. So that's what I did.
So now I sort of suffer without the automatic email event-calendar integrations, and the other cool stuff that AI had provided, but it's totally usable. I have no trouble using it as an email service with that AI disabled. It works fine.
Anyway, it is no secret that Google has always used the text of our emails for their own marketing and analysis purposes. Always has. Why did you think Gmail was a free service? Obviously, you were paying for it! We all paid for it with our email content!
The only two downsides:
1. A few people have reported my emails from fastmail (calendar invites mostly) going to their spam folder. Not enough reports so I'm not worried.
2. Google won't let me sign in and create / edit /comment in google docs with my custom email hosted at fastmail so I have to have a random@gmail.com account just to use free google docs to collaborate with people who only send me google docs.
Overall I think AI features are going to be great but give me the ability to pick and choose which I enable / disable and we should be good. If not then I agree with OP - Bye Bye Gmail.
oh, and don't read my emails and protect my privacy google! - no? Ok bye bye!
* Server-side filters.
* Tags. No, not folders. Many of my emails have 2-3 tags, some have 4-5. I wonder if it can even map to IMAP4; I see a few ways to model it.
* Good deliverability.
* Reasonable spam protection.
* Not hugely expensive. Ideally near-free, or self-hosted.
What are some options?
Re: tags, you can switch between classic folders or Gmail-style labels.
Re: filtering, it has an easy-to-use UI but you can write your own custom Sieve filtering rules if you want.
i use supmua (which inspired notmuch) which like gmail uses tags instead of folders. i could not go back to a folder based system. but i am really missing a webmail interface that works with tags.
Why not both?
The best thing I did recently was turn off the smart features, add a bunch of filters, and unsubscribe from stuff I was no longer interested in.
It was initially a shock to see so many emails I hadn't cared for, but an hour of curation, and it has been a delight ever since.
I'm planning to move to another service provider though. I can't trust Google anymore.
SMTP/IMAP/POP3, webmail (Roundcube), CalDAV/CardDAV, unlimited mailboxes, catch-all. Starting at $5/year for 2GB.
No marketing spend, and I terminate spammers immediately. If you run a legitimate domain, you subsidize yourself.
This isn’t for bulk senders or SLAs. It’s for developers and side-project founders who can configure their own clients and don’t want to pay $60-120/year.
https://www.cheapestemailhosting.com
Being "an early adopter" is not proof of anything other than being an early adopter.
> My email is now being hosted by Microsoft, so hopefully will be free of the outages
Ironically Microsoft just had an outage a couple of days ago.
Been using ProtonMail for 5 years but so annoying I can't propely search my emails because of the encryption, can't use standard IMAP without a proprietary connector, and their Drives/Docs suite is missing a lot of features.
(Workspace TOS is now part of the Cloud TOS https://workspace.google.com/terms/premier_terms/)
Section 12.11 of the Workspace specific terms confirms that Google will not train on customer data(which Gmail emails in workspace are). Incidentally, this is where Generative prompts and responses submitted or created via GA versions of Gemini in workspace are identified as “Customer Data”, which is not used for training. https://workspace.google.com/terms/service-terms/
Sure.
Google Has Most of My Email Because It Has All of Yours
They then have all your email. Fingerprint.
Big tech,.NSA, 5 eyes won the game. No chance unless something truly citizen oriented happens in most countries.
* add a filter that moves all email with "unsubscribe" into an "unsubscribe" folder
combined with fastmail spam filtering, my inbox actually became usable again instantly...
No regrets (since I am a mac & iphone user).
Plus, I can have a email per website, without exposing my main address.
https://alexlance.blog/email.html
Easy: I don't think so.
Advisable: Hell no.
I believe you have to constantly maintain it, and good luck with deliverability.
Anyone: correct me if I'm wrong.
OK: it's easy, unless you're the "atechnical" sort.
Is it recommended? I'm torn here, because the big beasts are systematically spam/junk-classifying and even rejecting e-mail sent from independent MXes despite ticking the right checkboxes (FQrDNS, SPF, DKIM, DMARC) and having a clean IP-address in a tidy network.
The fear around self hosting seems overblown. LetsEncrypt falls over more often than my E-mail.
However I did have issues with the VPS provider I was using getting blocked and not just my VPS’ IP but the entire block. So at some point it became tok tedious to have to follow the unblock process.
And so I switched to fastmail and have been using it for over two years. No major complaints.
Would I self-host again? If I have the free time I think its fun and you can learn a lot. However, if you have young kids and are too busy with life I would say go with a provider you trust with your data.
Mostly sending stuff from marketing automation/newsletter software.
Not an issue. Will be migrating the first few domains of off paid google workspace E-Mail to a self hosted solution. I actually don’t expect too much trouble.
But that’s currently still a hypothesis. I have seen a few people do that successfully. So I know it’s possible. Still. Not having hosted a mail infrastructure in 20 odd years…
My setup include notmuch as MUA, muchsync to have messages via ssh on some machines, MailDrop to auto-refile them and keep my inboxes clean enough. Generally speaking it's not that hard, but the need of many components and the absence of a shiny UI for end users makes their use a no go even for many generic GNU/Linux user.
Most development since to many years is only on WebMails that's the issue.
I feel I'm missing some part of the story. Where are they saying that?
A service to clean up the UI does nothing to solve the issue at hand.
The complaint was about the summary, which Mimestream doesn't include.
"We are going to use your email to train our LLMs. I'm not okay with that... my confidential commercial information is NOT okay to use to train your models [...] So... goodbye Gmail."
The title is Bye Bye Gmail.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
The rest of the complaint was about a bug that happened, just today, with sorting and spam control.
"I tried to turn it off. I can."
The complaint was about the summary, which Mimestream doesn't include.
Despite that, it appears it's not good for me (https://www.media.mit.edu/publications/your-brain-on-chatgpt...) It's great, it's easy, makes me feel good in the moment..of course it's bad for me!
Here's the thing. I like to read things from my friends that they have taken the time to write. I personally hate texting. All the nuance is gone. Often the humor. Sad. Makes me want to have a beer with you...eye contact...blech. The LAST thing I want is a summary...at the top of the email...highlighted..that I CANNOT turn off.
I tried to turn it off. I can. It's under `Gmail -> Settings -> General -> Smart Features (checkbox)`. BUT..the AI summaries is now grouped with the Smart Tabs.
For those of you who do not use Gmail Smart Tabs, Smart Tabs (officially the Tabbed Inbox) have been part of Gmail since 2013; well actually the technology behind them—Smart Labels—actually debuted two years earlier. (Thank you Gemini, yes I DO truly love you. Tell me again about the comparisons of Stephen Miller and Heinrich Himmler's tactics please?)
Smart Tabs automatically sort my incoming flood of solicited commercial email (cue laughter from those who know my first start-up) into five buckets:
* Primary: Email from you. * Promotions: K&L Wine Merchants at the top of the list. * Social: Hi Andrew on Facebook (that I only log into from Firefox running on a VM). * Update: Actual transactional emails from companies. * Forums: The Information at the top of the list (a newsletter I'd like to read but don't want to make the time justify paying for the content).
I tried turning off Smart Features and oh my, that's not usable. So I lived with the AI summary at the top. For a week. Then this morning, I saw several messages in my Primary tab that normally get sorted into Promotions, Social, Updates or Forums. This is not unheard of; sometimes a company uses a new incoming address or something and stuff gets put in the wrong bucket.
But THIS time, I got a popup that says I must "Share" this message with Google and links to the Privacy Policy and Google Terms of Service. And an explicit sentence: "Messages and attachments might be reviewed by humans, so don't share any sensitive or confidential information."
I'm not naive. I'm an early adopter, my email address includes my name and no numbers. I AM a direct marketer. From the get-go, having Google read my email in order to provide targeted advertising was part of the deal. I was fine with that.
BUT...now...what they are saying is that...we are going to use your email to train our LLMs. I'm not okay with that. That knowledge of my way of writing, my personal details, my confidential commercial information is NOT okay to use to train your models. 'Cause I expect mistakes will be made and more information will reside in the model than those at Google (or FB, MSFT etc) intended. And I'm not really up for assuming that risk.
So...goodbye Gmail. It's been great. Really great. I'm sure I'll miss you. Bye.
My email is now being hosted by Microsoft, so hopefully will be free of the outages and limits some of you have experienced with that email in the past. There it will reside until I cannot turn off MSFT's ability to read my email. Then I guess it's off to Switzerland ( [https://proton.me/about](https://proton.me/about) ); my email can be with my gold. JK.
Tom
p.s. why thank you Gemini for reformatting that for me into a clean, engaging markdown blog post. Yes, I do agree this is a sharp, timely take on the "AI-ification" of tools we use every day. I love you. Kill me last?
Instead of the transaction info which is strictly defined and uniformly formatted, they've attempted to give "friendly names" to each one and "simplify" the descriptions.
This has been a supremely bad idea. Firstly, it deprives me of essential info about each transaction, which I cannot access at all in the mobile app. I need to go into the website on a desktop computer, click through a few screens to say "this description is incorrect!" and request that they show me the original.
The "simple descriptions" elide a lot of useful info, such as the vendor's phone number.
Sometimes they are completely incorrect, like the name of my church gets a completely different and misleading name in every transaction. I cannot disable this.
Last year, there was a transaction during tax time that I believed to be some sort of penalty by the government, and I was freaking out about it, but it turned out to actually be my refund and had been "helpfully renamed" by my bank to be extremely misleading.
I have discussed these issues with the online support staff, and in person at my branch, and they are sympathetic, but there is nothing they can do about the app, and the only workaround for me is to individually flag each transaction as it comes in, and fix it, and there is no "global disable" or "global unfuck everything" button for any of us, anywhere.