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.

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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.

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?

Out of the pan, into the fire.

my recommendation: i've been happily using fastmail for years.

- 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.

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!

(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/

* 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?

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.

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.

Sure.

Google Has Most of My Email Because It Has All of Yours

* 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.

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?

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?