Bye Bye Gmail

AI summaries, “smart features”, and UX frustration

• Several commenters dislike Gmail’s Gemini summaries and how they’re bundled with long‑standing “smart features” (tabs, calendar extraction, grammar, etc.) into an all‑or‑nothing toggle.
• Some report similar “AIification” elsewhere (e.g., banks renaming transactions), calling it misleading, hiding important details, and often impossible to disable.
• A few say they simply turned off smart features and find Gmail still usable, while others find the resulting inbox overload intolerable without tabs and automated categorization.

Privacy, data use, and LLM training concerns

• Central worry: Google using email content to train LLMs, beyond traditional ad targeting. People are uneasy about commercial/confidential data being embedded in models and potential leakage.
• One commenter points out Workspace terms that explicitly say customer data (including Gmail in Workspace) is not used for training, and that Gemini prompts/results there are also protected.
• Others are unsure where exactly Google states that consumer Gmail is used for training; the warning about “messages might be reviewed by humans” is seen but not universally reproduced.

Switching away from Gmail: motivations and strategies

• Motivations: AI features that can’t be granularly disabled, distrust of Google’s direction, and desire for more control over data and account lockout risk.
• Migration tactics: use Google Takeout, import into new provider (Fastmail praised for smooth migrations), set up forwarding and labels for mail addressed to the old account, and auto‑responders asking contacts to update addresses.
• Some note that, in practice, relatively few accounts and contacts truly need updating, and the process is less painful than feared.

Alternative email providers: experiences and tradeoffs

• Strong enthusiasm for Fastmail (good spam filtering, labels/tags, custom domains, migration tools). Downsides: not free; occasional spam/deliverability hiccups; no EU servers.
• Proton is valued for privacy and custom domains but criticized for limited search over encrypted mail, IMAP via proprietary bridge, and weaker docs/drive features.
• Other options mentioned: mailbox.org, Infomaniak, Purelymail (very cheap, well liked but sustainability questioned), Zoho, iCloud custom domains, AWS WorkMail, small hosts (including ultra‑cheap niche providers).
• Many view moving from Google to Microsoft as “out of the pan, into the fire,” expecting similar AI/telemetry issues and citing past Outlook/Hotmail deliverability and outage problems.

Self‑hosting email: feasibility and deliverability

• Opinions split: some say it’s straightforward (Exim/Dovecot on a small VPS, running for a decade with few issues); others call it inadvisable due to security upkeep, IP reputation, and large providers’ hostility to independent MXes.
• Hybrid approaches: self‑host for receiving but relay outbound via SES/Sendgrid/etc., though cheap tiers may share IPs with spammers and hurt deliverability.

Owning your domain and email hygiene tips

• Strong consensus: use your own domain so you can change providers without changing your email address; just repoint MX records.
• Tips: standalone clients to monitor old + new accounts; filters to move “unsubscribe” mail out of the inbox; aggressive unsubscribing; catch‑all or aliasing per site (e.g., via addy.io) to manage spam and track leaks.

Limits of leaving Gmail

• Several note that Google will still see much of your correspondence because so many correspondents and services use Gmail or Google‑backed infrastructure.
• Nonetheless, many argue that regaining agency, reducing dependence on a single tech giant, and choosing providers with better policies is still worthwhile.