Most email is short. I don’t see a need to summarize it. Google is run by idiots and assholes.
Ai will write complicated long mails, you’ll need an Ai to summarise it
I put a tl;dr sentence or two at the top of any e-mail more than a couple of paragraphs. Sometimes for those too.
ive actually used it at work for stuff like “when did Wendy approve the design? did she send it to brian?” when I have 5 different email threads over 3 different organizations, with 10 different respondees. But in personal use I would never.
If mine could do that “find me the approval email for x last week” I’d use it, but if outlook had a decent search I wouldn’t need it.
Outlook has search?!
I’d settle for AI clipping out everyone’s redundant signatures, .gif logos, comic sans bible quotes, and everything else packed into email that people use as direct messaging. Or my coworkers could just use WebEx for chats instead of emails.
If an email needs to be summarized, I’m not going to read it anyway.
Turned off by default in EEA, UK, Japan and Switzerland, for anyone interested (had to login to find out).
Anyone wondering what they have in common: EU (i know its not the same as EEA, there are countries like Iceland non-member of EU but part of EEA and they have their own GDPR through their own Private Act) has GDPR, Japan has APPI, UK has UK-GDPR, Switzerland has FADP
Whats intriguing is that Canada has DCIA and Brazil has LGPD and I don’t see it being mentioned to be turned off by default in either countries
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buy domain
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buy hosting
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get email
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use thunderbird
I run my own email and I have to say I wouldn’t recommend it.
The biggest hassle is dealing with either Spamhaus or Microsoft, who apparently at random decide to put my IPs on blacklist, and who provide hurdles to working around this (for Spamhaus) or just say “no” (for Microsoft).
Would having aliases be a good way to bypass when a website denies your emails from your domain (which is known occurrence for who self-hosts their own email system)?
Mega brain move right here. Combined with a multitude of open source web mail clients and ur golden. SOGo and roundcube my beloved.
solid recommendations roundcube is goat
that takes me back to mid 2000s and horde webmail :)
Your new dentist/GP practice when you try to sign up?
@ Thunderbird? What is that?
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How the hell can they even afford that?! There are so many Gmail users and so many emails a second and Gemini will summarize them all? That sounds so expensive and like a waste of resources
It is, but the bubble mustn’t burst or the grifters will stop making money selling “the end of skilled labor” to braindead capitalists.
Actually, investment in AI is necessary for competing with other nations.
The “end of skilled labor” selling point is just to cover up that fact that we need AI because other nations will have it.
Countries are modern-day fiefs.
Alright, let’s tear this idea apart in plain, no-BS language. The whole “we gotta invest in AI to keep up with other nations” argument is like saying you need the flashiest new phone just because your neighbor got one—even if your old phone still works perfectly fine. Sure, some countries are all-in on AI like it’s the latest craze, but that doesn’t mean we have to jump on the bandwagon and mess up our lives.
The whole “end of skilled labor” hype is really just a cover-up. People have been doing amazing work with their hands and brains for ages—long before AI even existed. And let’s talk downsides: more people losing jobs, a privacy mess, and decisions being made by glitchy algorithms that might not give a damn about real-life problems. We didn’t need AI to build everything we have today. We’ve been doing just fine without handing over our lives to a bunch of computer code.
So, if you’re buying into the “we need AI to keep up with the cool kids on the global stage” nonsense, you’re ignoring the fact that the smart move might just be hanging on to good old human skill. Instead of racing into an AI-fueled chaos, maybe we should just keep doing what we do best—using our brains and common sense.
Google makes a lot of money, and summarising stuff uses a surprisingly small amount of energy. You can do it trivially on-device on a laptop and on plenty of phones.
When it comes to LLMs, training the models is generally the thing that requires ridiculous amounts of energy.
This is dumb as fuck, though. I don’t want Google’s LLM to miss out critical details in my emails. That shit could be important. If people want this they should opt in.
They probably use a smaller model for summarizing.
Cool, how do I disable this shit feature?
Stop using the shit service.
Ok this is the first step where I feel an actual urge to look for Gmail alternatives. (Been a Gmail user since like 2007.) I’m a desktop-only Gmail user, but I can see where this is going… :/ Also heavy user of Google Drive and Sheets, so it’s going to be annoying if I have to replace all of them :/
For me it was: Gmail to Tuta, Drive to Filen.io (some cheap German guys). But Sheets would be the most difficult. Maybe Zoho or Infomaniak? Infomaniak has the complete package IIRC.
thanks, I’ll check them out!
Unless I opt out of Gmail? Yep, already done.
Meh. I can’t find a good sub for YouTube and Gmail is my “uh oh did I mess up my email server back”.
I’ve been considering hush mail. I don’t like Europe. I’d rather move to Canadian
Canada isn’t going to be a safe bet in the long run. They have a reprieve for now but they always end up doing whatever America does just a few years later.
I’ll take my chances. I don’t have enough of a connection to Europe to put full trust in Europe. Maybe if the Netherlands wins euro 2025
buy a computer
put my data in there
computer computes my data too muchFUCK
More opt outs… Everyone, just opt out of big tech
We should opt into little tech. A guy in Venezuela just trying to buy a couple days food will read your email and summarize it for you!
This made me think of the South Park episode where they’re hiring people to replace the Amazon Alexa and stuff.
It’s so weird that we have to go through hoops and loops to get rid of this stuff! I was sick of my Android responding to a long press of the power button, meant to shut it down, with a Gemini prompt. Took me an hour to figure out I can’t get rid of the function, but I can switch back (for now) to old style Google Assistant.
If you have to force functionality down your users’ throat despite them not wanting it, you already lost. Gemini is Google’s Clippy, just less iconic and more also-ran.
If you have to force functionality down your users’ throat despite them not wanting it, you already lost.
As much as I’d like to think so, they’re not stupid, they know what they’re doing. They cram it in your face to make sure you know it’s there. And most people don’t care.
That’s ok :) All my important mails go to proton
The only thing I use my Google Account for is my TV. I haven’t logged into my gmail in years. And even that is a stretch. I use Jellyfin, and a sideloaded youtube client that doesn’t send anything back to Googs.
Where are you? From your comment, I’m sure you live in my house 🤣
The Proton owner is Trump-y. Tuta is another option
Show us the evidence of this claim about “Proton owner”. And yes, Tuta is great, I agree on that.
Evidence?
We should also be boycotting businesses that support establishment democrats.
I can’t go changing my email every time a ceo flips a switch and goes crazy. Your all gonna have to find something better than ‘just try this other one’
Get your own domain and use it for mail routing to whichever email service of your choice. Afaik gmail offers this, and so does probably any other decent email provider. That way if a provider turns to shit, you just need to set up with a different one, but don’t have to change any accounts.
Downside: you will have to pay for that domain for the rest of your life (or change all accounts again)
I’ve been meaning to do this for a while, maybe I’ll finally do it now.
This is the route I took, and at 10 dollars per year or so to maintain a domain, this is a very cheap way to remove some of the hold big tech has over our lives.
You can have Google forward your emails while you move over your accounts
Self hosting then
Totally doable, but also risky and convoluted as hell.
Btw (sort of just thinking out loud) could paying for an email domain be a solution? I see many webhosts offering email + domain packages for like 1-3 GBP/month, and we could just download the emails into, say, Thunderbird, so if a company turns shit, we still have the domain and all the emails received/sent over the years.
Ive actually been thinking about doing something like this. Im tired of being forced to rely on some company’s computer
Good luck getting people to pay for their own email setups let alone learn what it takes to host themselves and move said hosted setup around as the hosting service ceo’s flip scripts.
It was a really stupidly worded comment on his part. If he meant Big Tech and Little Tech spwcifically rather than Big Business in general and individual people, his choice of words and the claim that the tables had “completely turned” are really unfortunate. Tagging the annoying orange directly also doesn’t help make this look like it’s about the pick, rather than the picker.
As an aside, forgive me if I withhold my enthusiasm until I see her actually pull something through and not just end up another way to cripple ElMo’s competition.
Hey, thanks for sharing your thoughts. I’m sick of one clueless idiot posting something and then a whole crowd of brainless followers jumping on the bandwagon just to smear someone’s name (like what’s happening with Proton and Andy Chen, for example).
Honestly, I couldn’t care less if Andy was Trump’s biggest fan. Proton’s track record on privacy is rock solid. I spent two years digging into Tuta, Proton, disroot, and a bunch of others until I finally settled on Proton for my family—and I’ve never looked back. My wife, who used to throw money at Google like it was cash to burn, finally got an email service she could actually trust. That’s what matters here.
Now, I get it—Proton’s not perfect, and yeah, they’re a business with their own quirks and maybe some shady stuff waiting to surface. But we need to stop blindly following one crappy post without doing our own homework.
And sure, I hate a lot about Trump (not to mention Musk, who I honestly think is even worse), but let’s be real: the alternative of having Kamala Harris at the helm could’ve been a total nightmare. When I imagine her running the world’s most powerful economy and military, I’m picturing a hot mess that would plunge everyone into chaos. You think you’re safe from one disastrous trainwreck, only to replace it with an even bigger one!
Trump is pure asshole material, and you could probably say that about 90% of his cabinet and most Republicans too. So yeah, if you just skim the last bit, you might think I’m a Trump supporter. But if you read the whole thing, you’ll see I’m simply saying that, given the choices, staying on this crazy rollercoaster was the lesser of two evils. We need to weigh the bigger picture rather than jump on every outrage train without doing any actual research.
In reply to all of the complaints here: I’ve never seen anything about Gemini on my Graphene OS device. 🤷♂️
I’m surprised so many people who probably use Linux use a stock operating system on their phones
Despite efforts to the contrary, PC is still an inherently far more open platform, with better alternatives available.
I’m not sure what you mean? Are you saying Linux is a better alternative to windows than, e.g., LineageOS is to android?
I can fully encrypt my PC/BIOS password/secureboot if I have Linux on it. If I relock my bootloader with Android then I’m completely fucked if anything goes sideways. If I leave it open the phone gives a fucking warning on boot that the phone is unlocked and may be insecure and that warning can’t be disabled or locked. (Pixels)
I hope Android gets taken away from Google, 11 was the last somewhat useful upgrade.
conveniently my phone’s last update was 11 (god I wish there were more security updates past 11 2023)
Why would you admit that where others can potentially use that information to attack your device? Some cards you have to play close to the chest.
fair, but I am going to try and get a pinephone soon anyway ¯\(ツ)/¯
In my opinion the last great was Android 7. Just getting more locked down since.
But also it was kinda funny when manufacturers left over some of their software. I think it was ZTE which had a hidden menu to change the fucking IMEI.
Linux is a better alternative to windows than, e.g., LineageOS is to android?
It’s true. Camera apps for example are much, much worse than the OEM version.
Unless it’s quite shitty.
I’ve got Ulefone, and the default audio source (software) is dogshit quality. And that’s what the camera app uses, unless I use something like Open Camera where I can manually select “Unprocessed” rather than default.
For the idea
Default: https://files.catbox.moe/d2n7sg.flac
Unprocessed: https://files.catbox.moe/xf9ab8.flacVery obvious, at least with earphones.
I’m saying it’s better known and more accessible.
PCs are fundamentally designed to be OS-agnostic, Android hardware is not.
Better known, sure, but idk if it’s fair to say it’s more accessible. I’ve had less trouble using custom ROMs on my smartphones than I’ve had with Linux on PC
But your recipient uses it.
Exactly.
Communication with people is hard enough already without an LLM deciding what parts are important.
Idiots using LLMs to write emails to people using LLMs to summarise them. It’s just slop all the way down.
One of my co-workers uses AI to write every single one of his reports. Ugh…
Damn. It was 3 at night and i’ve read gemini somehow as gmail and it still makes sense.
End users: To access Gemini summary cards, users need to have smart features and personalization smart features in Gmail, Chat, and Meet and smart features in Google Workspace turned on. Visit the Help Center to learn more about collaborating with Gemini in Gmail.
Sounds like it’s an opt in, what am I missing
If you already had smart replies or similar enabled (they were available before Gemini hit the scene) then you have to go opt out.
That makes sense
Sounds like it’s an opt in, what am I missing
Because it’s a clear step on the enshittification slide. It’s opt in for now.
Would opting out actually do anything except keep you from using the feature? Pretty certainly they will still let the ai read your emails if there is any benefit to google in it, but you just wont be seeing the summary.
If you read the article, it says this only applies to people that already have premium google office stuff already. The 90% of people with regular gmail accounts aren’t affected by this. For now at least.
Well, let’s break it down with a little humor and a nod to the inevitable AI email overlords!
Sure, the article points out that the premium Google Workspace users get a special treatment—like being offered champagne instead of soda—but if you’re part of the 90% rolling with regular Gmail, you’re still enjoying your familiar, free soda pop (for now). However, don’t get too comfortable: whether you’re sipping premium champagne or pop, Google’s AI is always lurking in the background, ready to “swallow” your emails and extract insights like a digital detective. In other words, even if you’re not part of the fancy club, your emails are still part of the grand data buffet.
So while the article might claim it’s all rainbows and free soda for most, the truth is that Google is perfecting their AI trick regardless of your account type. It’s like distinguishing between first-class and economy on a flight—different levels of service, but everyone’s still on the same plane, and the in-flight entertainment (that is, AI data crunching) is serving up free snacks to all!
And that’s why I set up forwarding from Gmail and Outlook to my new Tuta account.
In a few months I should be free, happily paying for EU alternative were the default swipe gesture stands for delete instead of archive.
Forwarding in itself doesn’t do shit as they still have your mail
But yea if you want to avoid Google’s website that’s nice I guess
I would also use a mail alias service so you get more privacy and can switch mail host whenever you want
Both of the services have the option to delete all forwarded messages. This is simply the best first step in order to be able to review what accounts still work with the old addresses (via inbox rules) and slowly change them. I use addy.io for mail aliasing already, but that is not really related to gaining independence from those companies.
Your data goes through them. Some scanning could have already been done, and data has been sent. Sure it’s better than nothing, but it’s not better than fully switching
