I am angry at Google and wanted to share (rant)
Edit: if this post does not meet the general quality standards of Tildes, I absolutely understand and apologize. Likewise if I should have posted this in a different subsection - ~misc or ~talk maybe?
So, recently I've been annoyed by this new thing in Gmail (and yes, I should be transitioning away from Google services) where this field pops up at the top of my email list called 'Happening Soon'. It mostly has shipping / tracking notifications saying 'hey, this thing with a tracking number is arriving tomorrow'.
I've been annoyed by it because there wasn't an easy way to disable this 'feature' and that perceived loss of agency (and reminding me that my Gmail account isn't really 'mine') was frustration inducing.
So I googled it (I recognize the irony here) - "disable "happening soon" gmail" - and found a Gmail help / community post with a bunch of people expressing the same desire to not have this forced upon them: https://support.google.com/mail/thread/346511942/how-to-disable-happening-soon-for-those-who-see-it-on-gmail-inbox-which-is-related-to-an-amazon-pu?hl=en but while plenty of people shared my frustration, I wasn't finding definitive answers on how to properly disable it.
So I decided to poke around inside of settings. There actually was a section for smart tracking reminders but that was not enabled. Then I saw a rather vague 'Smart Features' that was enabled that I didn't remember seeing before. I disabled that, Gmail had to restart, and then those notifications were gone.
I wanted to share this how-to with all the other people who posted to that Gmail support thread. I simply replied with "To disable this on desktop, go into settings and disable 'Smart Features'. That seems to fix it."
Suddenly I understood why no one else had posted the fix. My post was flagged instantly for 'content policy violations'. Specifically it said "Failed to post. Content violates Community Policy."
Yes, helping other Gmail users figure out how to turn off experimental 'features' we never asked for violates their policy of, I presume, being able to experiment on their userbase. Arg. That ticked me off.
The wonder of the normalization of dishonesty online means I can't easily see your post about Google's dishonesty, as Imgur does not like my IP address, and thus lies and says "Imgur is temporarily over capacity. Please try again later".
Funny enough I was just about to post about imgur as well. I tried to view OPs image on mobile and was pinching to zoom to read the text, and as soon as I did, imgur decided what I REALLY wanted to see was a suggested post of some young girl doing a cosplay dance. I figured I just tapped the wrong thing so I closed the tab and tried the same thing again twice. Nope. Just more cosplay dances.
Fuck the modern internet.
A shocking number of web designers don’t care about breaking people’s expectations to how their stuff works.
As an old person I guess, I expect to be able to page through webpages with the spacebar, to be able to fill out forms by pressing tab to go to the next field, and to be able to search through drop-down menus by pressing the first few letters of the thing I want to select. But all of these things are things I have seen being overridden by overzealous web designers. But I guess if I’m not poking at the web with my finger I’m a freak.
This is frustrating for me, too. It's one thing is a website doesn't want to serve users using a VPN, but it's mildly insulting to be lied to about it.
Reddit also blocks VPN, I got an entire blocklist page that said they don't allow VPNs. LOL.
Ah, the classic "blocked by network security" page, complete with a little Reddit mascot in a fedora. I don't know if it works for others, but at least for Mullvad you can just keep refreshing your location until Reddit loads again.
I've had that, but increasingly I just close the page. I've seen the Carrefour supermarket website blocks me when I'm on the VPN, so I just don't shop there. I wonder sometimes whether I should contact them and say, but I'm sure they don't care. I'd just be the weirdo shaking my fist at the virtual customer services counter...
Wow. That is a new one to me.
It feels like the European Union is the only political body with power actually forcing things to be... not the worst they could be.
Well, and Louis Rossmann I guess, on a smaller scale. He's been able to get some positive results here and there.
Anyone have a good alternative to imgur? I did some preliminary searching without good results. Found imgbb and tried that but it's very slow and compressed the image to the point you can't read the text: https://ibb.co/0RYkd1N8
A few Tildes people use https://envs.sh/ and I started to as well. Very fast no BS no ads nothing
Thank you!
I've used https://postimages.org/ a few times now, since imgur tries to push the app or account or something on mobile.
Though I don't think the text is particularly compressed on that image? It's pretty legible when I zoom in. Maybe the font is a tiny bit pixelated, but it doesn't look too different from the Imgur link to me.
Are you sure it's loaded correctly in your browser? For me I can open your link just fine and the image seems to have even higher quality than the version on imgur. I can certainly read the text just fine.
But as other options, FMHY also suggests PixVid and Catbox (and a bunch more, but those two along with imgbb are the top recommendations)
You can see it fine?
Ok, it's just me then. It loads like it's an image from the internet circa 1999.Huh, it works fine now. When I first uploaded it and perhaps 15 minutes later when I tried looking at it again it was really compressed / grainy quality and I couldn't read the text.
I started hosting Slink on my home server and exposed it with a cloudflare tunnel / cool domain. I'm sick of cool image hosters going under or becoming shit later, so I figured just doing it myself was the best for my use case.
I was about to say "I need to add that to my to-do list as that sounds useful".... but really I need to get my mental health sorted as that is the rate-limiting factor on me actually working through my to-do list.
...hmm. Ok, I'm adding it to my to-do list, somewhere after actually instantiating the home server / NAS that I already bought and assembled all the hardware for and is just sitting under my computer desk turned off.
Sorry, had to rant at myself for a sec. Thank you for the new info on Slink, I did not know about it and appreciate being informed.
Oh my God thank you so much I've been trying to figure out how to turn off those stupid notifications for forever. My Gmail consistently hallucinates that deliveries that happened last week are happening today, for some reason, and it's worse than useless!
I'm really glad this was of actual use to someone here.
...i dealt with a similar issue yesterday in outlook: i'd received two malicious emails overnight sent as calendar invitations for a 7.30 AM meeting, which outlook automatically added to its calendar and proceeded to popcorn me with notifications through both outlook + teams on every device before i'd even opened anything at work...
...i don't have the option to change platforms at work, but despite my continued efforts to disable + dis-integrate, it's becoming impossible to keep AI agents from scanning and intercepting what should be dead-simple separate applications which do exactly what i tell them, no more...
...this has grown pervasive across the industry, not just gmail + outlook, and in my struggle to stay the tide (disabled that auto-calendar feature, but it'll be something new next week) i feel like we've crossed some threshold where we're now serving the machines rather than the inverse...
Gear icon --> See all settings --> General --> (about mid way down) Smart features
I also have a rant about their search feature. They stopped allowing "quotes" exact search. Eg, "best buy" will return "best Western" and "click this to buy this now". Becoming unusable. These days it's usually non serious emails, the rest go to a different account
I didn't realise the search thing! I've been supremely annoyed by it, thinking it must be some sort of mistake or that I somehow forgot how to perform searches.. :/
I’m disappointed but not surprised.
I keep meaning away from gmail, but every solution I find requires I give up using an aggregate app, deal with AI bullshit (I know gmail does this already but why move for more of the same?), or an investment of money I simply don’t have into a service (most services don’t offer regional pricing) or buying some cheap (fur USians) equipment to self host. Not really sure what a bird’s to do.
Self hosting email is not worth the effort unless it's a hobby for you. There are too many providers that will send your emails to the aether and you won't have any clue why unless you're actually into the stuff. You'll just never hear responses. It's not like most services where you can grab a docker image and throw it on a server, hook up some DNS wires and be done.
...yeah, i went down the whole self-hosting path last decade and it's really not worth the hassle anymore due to the ongoing effort of working around automated whitelists + blacklists while staying vigilant against server penetrations...
Everyone always says this, but I have been self hosting for years and none of my mail has failed to deliver? If you properly set up DNS and are not on an IP blocklist like many of the major VPN IP ranges (OVH for instance fares poorly), you probably won’t have an issue. Plus, refusing to self host SMTP just continues to make this issue worse?
I have experience running a mail server with a business and have had countless issues of mail deliverability. The worst thing about it is that you will usually never know when your emails are being blocked, and if you are not sending large volumes of emails than it only takes one accidental send to junk button press for some email services to decide to block all of your emails. If that happens, you can send an email to ask about it but don’t expect to ever hear a response.
There’s also a lot of other difficulty related to self hosting in particular that should make doing it unattractive like local power and internet outages that providers are generally not going to have as issues that often, but you are doubtlessly already aware.
Paying for an email provider makes things so much easier and more stress free. It’s absolutely worth it.
Do you happen to have any kind of blog post or guide describing what you have set up for self-hosted email? Or--second-best--a particular guide or tutorial written by someone else, that you think captures the necessary requirements?
I keep flirting with the idea of self-hosting my email, but I keep chickening out for the various "it's so much harder than other self-hosted stuff" posts I keep seeing.
The technical parts are more or less the easy part. The hard part is dealing with when mail from your host is blocked or rejected for non-technical reasons (usually stupid ones), or unknown reasons. Sometimes you more or less have no power to fix the issues, and just have to accept that entire providers (say, hotmail) will reject all your email.
I just run SNM. Their docs have a guide to get you a 10/10 on mail-tester.com, that has been plenty good enough for me.
A alternative to entirely self hosting is with you owning the domain but using a established mail provider. This helps a lot in regards to trust and while you do need to set the proper dns entries they will take care of a lot of the other technical aspects.
I have been using mailbox.org and have had little to no issues, but there are other providers as well or course.
IDK, I've been self-hosting my email for coming up on a decade with very little work and good deliverability all around. The deliverability issues I had at the start were my own fault, for i.e. not setting up DKIM correctly.
Apologies if you’ve already checked them out, but does FastMail fit what you’re looking for? I’m not sponsored or anything, but I’ve been thinking of switching to them recently, and I saw (some) localised pricing on their website, but it might still not meet what you’re looking for.
I've used Fastmail for years at this point and I've never had a problem. $5 dollars a month (US pricing) isn't cheap cheap, but its not terrible for a solid service.
I switched to FastMail away from Gmail for my primary email and have been fully satisfied. +1 from me too.
I have checked, or have tertiary emails on some of, a number of other services, maybe one of these could fit OP's needs: Tuta, Mailfence, Mailbox.org
Thanks for the rec! I’m going to do their “try for 30 days” to see what it’s like, but 24BRL/month is probably a little much for me right now. In terms of PPP (purchasing power parity) the 5USD US users pay is equivalent to a purchase here of about 12BRL, which would be much more doable for me; the 24BRL fastmail asks for here is equivalent to a little less than something costing 10USD for you. Oranges and apples, etc.
(I can’t find any reference to it by now, but I remember some months ago mastodon flipped out about fastmail, which was the first I’d heard of it. It hadn’t been on my radar at the time so I don’t remember what the fuss was about.)
Yeah I assumed it wasn’t just “do they use my local currency” but more like “do they acknowledge purchasing power or just shove the number through a currency converter” like so many places do.
I’ve found that lots of smaller online shops all use Shopify, and I’m pretty sure they default just run it through a converter. For totally separate reasons, I’m starting to get frustrated by that too.
If a website URL ends in .com.au and I’m paying in Australian dollars with my Australian bank card and delivering to an Australian address, it’s always a nasty surprise to then be hit with an “international transaction fee” out of nowhere, because the website is just a reskinned version of some overseas “main office” location but they never warn me about that during the checkout process at all.
Another +1 for Fastmail. I use them for my personal email and have for around a decade plus now. Highly recommended.
Happily been using Fastmail for the past five years without a single issue. It's a straight up better experience than Gmail.
Tuta (Germany) and Proton (Switzerland) are the only two providers I'd recommend as an alternative to Gmail. I actually use Tuta mostly and it's pretty good, and they are privacy advocates with recently threatening to sue if Chat Control were to pass.
They have a free tier (with not much storage) and a paid tier, the paid tier is worth it at least out of principles.
For me, proton was a terrible experience, because they don’t support IMAP. The desktop “bridge” was a buggy unreliable mess, and it eventually took me a long time to exfiltrate all the emails, calendar items and other data that accumulated from my time with them. Their tools aren’t very comprehensive. In many ways, it was more complicated leaving Proton than it was getting away from Google and Gmail.
This is what keeps me from Proton. My partner uses it, or tries to. I understand why no IMAP but that won’t work for me.
Similar to your experience, at work, they recently enabled the upgraded (enterprise? "work"?) version of Co-Pilot. Now, at the start of each Word doc is a Co-pilot summary bar. I have not figured out how to disable, and it may even be forced by global policy. Likewise, all Office apps are now plastered with Co-pilot pop-ups and content. Even the MS Forms website has a large Co-pilot side panel with suggestion on improving my forms. Some of these can be disabled (Excel, at least, had a setting to minimize the number of these annoyances). Even OneNote has a Co-pilot line at the top of a new note offering assistance. This is like Clippy on steroids. It's like Microsoft was upset that people didn't take Clippy seriously in the 90s and they are unleashing their vengeance on us all with Co-pilot. Clippy is laughing from his grave.
They threw so much money at AI, each product team has to justify what they're doing to make use of it and generate value etc. so stupid.
But sometimes it is useful though :/ it is pretty good at wading through a million SharePoint files and emails, if I supervise and tell it it's got it wrong and try again until I have a verified solution
Yep. There is so much funding in AI right now that many companies seem to be in a race to use it, and AI companies are in a race to market it to everyone.
Don't get me wrong, some of the applications and uses are pretty good, but jeez, does it need to be in everything?
I effin' hated Clippy! It was one of the reasons I switched to Apple. Reading your description gave me shivers, and laughs, simultaneously. (Thank goodness I don't have to use any Microsoft programs anymore.)
Glad you got a kick out of it haha! A part of me is starting to seriously consider my next job and what it should be doing to avoid sitting 8 hours in front of a Windows computer using Office apps. I am starting to feel I have put enough years in this kind of job and next time I'm looking, it will have to be very different, hopefully away from a computer altogether if possible. When I volunteer, I work with people in person, and while it can sometimes be difficult and draining, I gotta say that after 2-3 hours of volunteering I feel more "accomplished" than after a week at my regular job.
I can't wait for their version of MS BOB on steroids! I unironically hope that is their plan for Windows 12 since I can just laugh from a distance.
I suppose you've passed your threshold of tolerance for Google, but, in case you wanted to "play" a little with the content blocking algorithms: Maybe try coding your message a little bit. Using synonyms, alternate wording, misspellings, spaces inside words, maybe even use non-ASCII alphabet characters (accented letters, etc.). Maybe instead of mentioning Smart Features, refer to it as "the [N]th option from the top", or whatever. Other options including writing elsewhere (e.g. pastebin, github gist), and linking to it.
Gear icon --> See all settings --> General --> (about mid way down) Smart features
I also have a rant about their search feature. They stopped allowing "quotes" exact search. Eg, "best buy" will return "best Western" and "click this to buy this now". Becoming unusable. These days it's usually non serious emails, the rest go to a different account
This is weird. That function is working properly for me. Maybe there are settings somewhere to enable or disable the search with quotes function?
That or they have done something with rollout / rotating changes? I've seen them do that on YouTube where new stuff or annoying 'features' happen to some people but not others.
You should buy a domain name and switch email providers. Don't just switch providers - anyone could enshittify their email hosting in the future. If you own the domain you are always able to switch the host without much inconvenience.
Any recommendations on providers?
I use protonmail. They are okay but not necessarily the best fit for everyone.
I also really hate the shipping notifications and the "Purchases" tab. But, I do appreciate that when I buy plane tickets, they are automatically added to my google calendar. If I turn off the smart features will the plane ticket functionality remain? Or is there a way I can get rid of the purchases bullshit but keep the plane ticket functionality?
My apologies, but I don't know the answer to this one. I also recognize it's kind of an expensive thing to 'test'. You can't exactly change an option and buy a plate ticket just to see if you changed the right thing.
Indeed haha, and I'm also quite worried that if I turn it off now I will forget that this doesn't auto-happen and maybe not miss a flight, but definitely plan something when I'm going to be out of town
I have the same problem. It looks like automatically adding events to calendars has been lumped into the "smart features" toggle, so you can't disable the annoying features without also disabling the useful features.
glad to have an answer, but goddammit, that's fucking irritating
There might be a script or somethin? I haven't looked. But yeah. Sucks.
I'm using hey.com nowadays and it's pretty nice.
I haven’t used gmail on the browser in a couple weeks but I haven’t seen this popup, wondering if its because I edited a ton of the privacy configs years ago.
I received a prompt some months/weeks ago that was suggesting I turn on "smart features". I said no thanks like I always do. I'll only start using some new feature if I hear about its usefulness from multiple reliable outside sources and see that the reasoning applies to myself (which it often does not).
Something else that was bugging me was the banner exclaiming "You could lose X years of history!!" or something like that, prompting me to give them more contact info. Obviously closing it only makes it disappear for a brief while, after which it's back again to annoy you. Eventually I used UBlock Origin to get rid of it.
When I get the ‘you could lose your history’ one sometimes I go and create one of those zip file downloads. There really isn’t anything in there that I would lose besides some personal emails which are now backed up several times lol
I know I’m like all autistic or whatever per my pediatric psychiatrist but I seriously don’t understand people who just keep all their data in one service that they could lose access to.
It's a shame that we have to be careful with data. There's a lot of services that would be neat or useful if I could trust they were only doing the exact thing they're supposed to do.