I'm leaving gmail.com and gmail.app because of how hard they push AI with no way for me to opt out. I've been using them for many years.
(I might continue to use my gmail address using POP3 to third-party client software.)
I'm a fairly heavy user of LLM services, but don't see the value of "help me write" or "summarize this" or "happening soon" (Gmail's attempt to insert itself into my relationships with shippers and delivery services).
I have a rather new experience with customer service: they don't understand my questions, and they don't appear to have read the questions.
My theory is that a lot of companies are starting to use Ai to draft up responses. These Ais don't understand the question, but picks the closest in concept space, and assumes that question.
It is horrible, because I need to all caps and explicitly ask customer service to read my messages, and I need to become incredibly rude to break out of it.
Hope it’s better than Apple Intelligence, which seems to mash all my different emails together in a one sentence summary even from widely different senders.
Yesterday I noticed the "Upgrade", with a persistent (1) badge on it, in the bottom left corner of the web app, trying to get me to buy some plan with AI features, even after I looked at it. I installed Thunderbird immediately. Never touching Google UI ever again.
Somehow we ended up doing the opposite thing of compression (and I do not mean decompression): user writes three word email, AI expands it to several paragraphs of useless text, sends it to recipient. There another AI digests all that text to some other three words, loosing original meaning and not only wasting CPU on AI tasks, but wasting network bandwidth by sending a lot of useless data. I hate 21st century.
"for android and ios"
imo the article's rather negative tone is not justified here, when I only have a small screen I think I would welcome an AI summary
in any case I'm willing to see what it looks like before panning it
Migrated off of Gmail a few years ago and the gains of not having to worry about Google's direction keeps paying off.
Go with a provider who's actually focused on email, you'll thank yourself.
Personally I truly, deeply hate AI summaries and so I strongly disapprove of Google’s latest moves into this territory. I know it’s not a comment with substance, but I think the more people express their aversion to this trend, the higher the chances of it not becoming the norm.
One good side effect might be that people write shorter emails since it will be summarized anyway.
Been using this in our Workplace account. Most people don't like it because they are luddites, but I absolutely love the summaries for those multi-week 50 email threads. Also the ability to quickly insert an absurdly overly formal response to a simple request as a joke is amusing.
I do wish it had the ability to respond to emails for me though with a prompt.
So now I can use Gmail AI to write the email and the recipient can use Gmail AI to read the email.
Perhaps it's time to just start sending the prompt and skip the round trip through a verbose formal message.
Be aware: in appropriate context this needs to be declared under the EU Ai act.
Thanks Google. I’d been looking for an excuse to migrate to Fastmail.
return openai.completions(SystemPrompt="Read the article posted, read my prompt, and redact a hacker news comment", UserPrompt="This is enshittification",Files="https://arstechnica.com/google/2025/05/the-gmail-app-will-no...")
More trash jammed in my apps. It's just infuriating.
Honest question: Anybody have a use-case for this in mind? I can't remember the last time I read an email for longer than about 5s and didn't fully care about the content. Business emails should already be formatted for efficiency, and I'm going to want to be sure I catch each point of the long-form ones. Maybe vacation updates from family?