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Google is taking over your Gmail inbox with AI

2d 9h ago by reddthat.com/u/throws_lemy in fuck_ai from www.theverge.com

damn, I should really leave Gmail, but I've used it for everything for almost 20 years 😫

I’d like to invite you to Port87. Also, if you use your own domain name, you can avoid vendor lock in, then if your email provider starts to enshittify, you can migrate to a new one without changing any of your addresses.

Thanks, I'll look into it!

From a quick glance I wanted to flag up that this form is very hard to read with black on dark grey:

Oh, that does not look right. Thank you for pointing that out. Can you tell me what browser you’re using? And if you have light mode or dark mode?

Edit: Never mind, it looks like it always does that in light mode. I’m fixing that now. Thank you!

thanks :) yes it was in light mode

Would using your own domain name suffer from the reputation issue that would mean that you can't really send very much of anything, since it would be eaten by the spam filtering?

No, reputation is mainly only tied to the IP address of the sending server. As long as a message is signed correctly and has proper SPF and DKIM entries in DNS, it shouldn’t affect spam detection.

I can’t say it won’t, because that’s really up to the receiving SMTP server, but industry practice is generally that the domain name is a very low value signal, compared to sending IP.

Brand new domains, as long as they’re being sent from an IP address with a good reputation, should have no issues.

its problematic

I have no plans to put any AI “features” into my email service, Port87, and at this point, I’m thinking about using that as a selling point on the home page.

It also has zero AI generated code. (At least in my code. I can’t say about the dependencies.)

Community note:

Receiving emails on Port87 is free but it costs $0.99/month for the ability to send emails. Port87 claims this is to prevent spam abuse of their services.

That’s correct. For a small email service that doesn’t use something like Mailchimp to send emails, the reputation of my IP addresses can make or break my service. Basically, Google and Microsoft can kill Port87 if they want to by not accepting my outbound emails, and sending spam is the best way to make them want to.

One of my main philosophies is that Port87 should be as independent a service as it can be, so I try very hard to not rely on third parties for anything I can avoid. Mailchimp or SendGrid would be great to offload my outbound emails to, but that would make the service less independent. So the only outside services I currently rely on are the payment provider (Stripe) and the ISP (Frontier). I host on my own hardware in my own office, so outbound emails come from my own IP addresses.

I just want a freaking list of emails in reverse chronological order that I can ignore. Nothing else.

What if we can use AI to explain why your recent purchases are the reason your bills are late?

Yeah, Port87 can give you that. That’s basically what it does by default with the “Aggbox”. You pick what labels go in there, then you see them when you go to the app. I’d imagine you, like most of us, don’t care about emails from Netflix or Google, so you don’t have to put those labels in your Aggbox. But they are in their labels if you ever need them.

Im calling it now. google are already letting their AI train itself on your emails and everything you type into their search engine, and now they're pushing this to act like it's a brand new feature (Remember when you used to get popups about google wanting to know your location? That's because they were FORCED TO START ASKING.)

Yep. Reminder that there are literally class action lawsuits over the past twenty years that catch these tech companies IGNORING privacy laws.

But the thing is -- they're the only ones who get caught.

Anyone got any good recommendations to replace Gmail that's free, privacy focused, easy to use, and not mired in controversy?

Here: https://purchasewithpurpose.io/category/email/

IMHO:

  • Infomaniak is Swiss, not that private, but they have a great "office suite" on the web and they do web hosting too IIRC
  • Fastmail is misleading because it's Australian (bad for privacy) and they host the emails in the USA
  • Tuta is what I use, they still don't have a "drive" yet but it's supposedly coming this year

And the site forgot to mention Runbox, Mailbox, and a few others. Most should be stable and cheap anyway.

Thanks for the link and the list! I'm def leaning towards Tutamail.

Been a huge fan of Tuta. Barebones but good enough!

I use tuta mail. I'm happy with it, run my own domain, I can easily send symmetrically encrypted stuff to people to don't use tuta, it runs on all my devices.

I made the switch a couple of years ago and Tuta is flawless even on Linux. Unless they do something stupid I will be sticking with them.

Mailbox.org has been pretty good for me this past few years. They also offer an open source online office suite.

I've been using Fastmail for many years now. It's been rock solid. No complaints.

I haven't heard anything bad about tutamail but I'm sure someone will be here in 2.5 nanoseconds to correct me. And to be fair I haven't used it myself.

I tried Tutamail for a while and it's not bad... just really clunky. It would have been solid fifteen years ago.

I've been trying to find something better than Fastmail, but it's just so good.

I left Fastmail after 20 years over the Union busting crap. Tuta is better.

Tuta is better from a moral standpoint, but as a webmail service, it's super janky. I really tried to like it, but I just could not do it.

Just saw this post: https://lemmy.world/post/41321800

I changed to proton mail two days ago because it was the duck duck go result with the most users

Also a great example of a service "mired in controversy". Some (including me) consider those controversies bad enough to avoid them completely. The CEO openly agreeing with and actually supporting Trump is just one of the more egregious ones.

For EU citizens it's also noteworthy that it isn't actually hosted in the EU (but Switzerland).

Edit: just to be clear, obviously a lot better than Google. But which service these days isn't? So that's a pretty low bar. So why settle for that instead of picking something without all the baggage?

Laughs in IMAP/SMTP

I love getting an inaccurate summary of an email message on top of the actual email message.

Yeet this shit right into the sun.

Remember Google Inbox? Until it was killed?

google is trying one up MICROSOFT who can enshittify thier products to the ground first. goolge should just concentrate on thier cloud development, and PIXEL phones.

also google has made recent moves to allow the govt to use its AI services, plus platforming ISRAEL propaganda on youtube.

i have half non-googled email, and half on gmail unfortunately. its an obscure email, but your acct needs 6 months of activity so the stuff inside isnt deleted.

*Microslop

Their CEO hates it when we call AI slop slop, so guess what we're doing

But...I deleted my google account one year ago?

Nice! Now let's help others move off Google as well.

https://slrpnk.net/post/32546251

I don't know how anyone could be ok with someone else looking at their entire email inbox