When you disable all of these features, eventually it turns off email categorisation.
At first this was annoying to me because it’s obviously a very good feature. But the last few weeks have been quite revealing: I’ve been receiving and unsubscribing from tons of emails I had no idea I even received regularly, because categories buried them away.
I wonder how much of newsletter marketing (and paid email marketing) is being propped up by the GMail categories just silently ingesting tons of stuff that people never read or see (but also never unsubscribe from)
> I wonder how much of newsletter marketing (and paid email marketing) is being propped up by the GMail categories just silently ingesting tons of stuff that people never read or see (but also never unsubscribe from)
I don't know, gmail regularly tells me "you haven't opened an email from XYZ newsletter in a while, do you want to unsubscribe?", with a direct button to do so.
Might be a mobile app / EU-based account only thing, but I've seen it numerous times and I'm almost certain I've seen it on the web version of Gmail too.
The only reason I am still using gmail is due to choice paralysis. I do not know which email service to choose and pay for. I do not like Proton. Is Fastmail the way to go? There is also the German one posteo. Should I just use Apple's mail? I'm taking suggestions if you have anything to share.
Fastmail; I moved nearly three years ago, and never regretted it. If you can stand the five-eyes aspect, of course.
Also, I use its under-publicized 10GB of free space (i.e., additional to the 10GB of mail space allowance) to more than comfortably host LDAP data such as my Joplin data, and Floccus bookmarks.
I was always afraid to switch from Gmail, knowing the impact it would have. But I switched to Fastmail this year and my experience has been comparatively frictionless. My fear was unfounded.
I'm an iCloud+ subscriber and have moved a couple of my e-mail addresses across to use Apple's servers (about a year ago) for 'free'.
So far, it has worked consistently with no problems. The only annoyance is iyt doesn't seem that you can break multiple icloud-hosted mailboxes out into their own GUI mailboxes in the Mail client - they all get dumped into a Mailbox called 'Cloud'
I use fastmail for my and my family's mail, with many domains. It works fantastically, the android app and web app are very good, and it allows any settings, forwarding, clients, automation that I could think of.
The other features (files, file sharing, calendar) are also well designed and get out of your way.
Fastmail is the way. These are people for whom email is their job and focus and you get everything that comes with that, including good and responsive customer service.
So are the email servers used by the recipients of your emails, no? Almost everybody uses gmail, so even of you don't most of your email correspondence is going to end up, or originate from, on gmail servers anyway.
I've been using mailbox.org for 5 years and like it very much. Cost some 3 EUR per month (actually there's a 50% discount this week).
Dead simple email that just works. Their webUI is fine, but I almost exclusively use it on iOS or macOS with the default mail app. They also have some other features (calendar, office suite, video calls) that I don't use. I really like the option to create up to 25 email aliases.
How often do big providers like Gmail, customers of whom you will want to communicate with, eat the emails? I know that this is common if you run your own email server, and often just gone and not even to spam.
Google would probably justify this as security, and not necessarily unreasonably, but it has a clear anti-competitive effect too. The security concerns would be more credible if they made it easy to debug this, like giving a useful error message back to the sender stating what the missing security criteria are and having a clear process for appeals (like if you got unlucky with an IP address, or if you are missing a specific security measure on your domain).
Having your own domain connected to Apple Mail or Proton is fundamentally different than hosting your own email. Only the latter is at much risk of that.
With so many settings spread across multiple sections, especially in Workspace accounts, it's challenging to keep track of how existing settings are affected by each new addition. I generally review these regularly, yet find surprises now and then.
Knowing what setting does what in Gmail is becoming difficult by the day.
> Enabling the feature in Workspace says that “you agree to let Google Workspace use your Workspace content and activity to personalize your experience across Workspace,” according to the settings page, but according to Google, that does not mean handing over the content of your emails to use for AI training.
User-facing software is full of language like that these days and I find it really frustrating, because it never helps answer the questions attentive people actually have, like will that mean my emails get dumped into the next Gemini training run?
Maybe circumstances have changed? I certainly trusted 2008 Google a lot more than Google in 2025. It's really amazing to see a company just throw trust and goodwill out the window, even worse to see that it pays.
When you disable all of these features, eventually it turns off email categorisation.
At first this was annoying to me because it’s obviously a very good feature. But the last few weeks have been quite revealing: I’ve been receiving and unsubscribing from tons of emails I had no idea I even received regularly, because categories buried them away.
I wonder how much of newsletter marketing (and paid email marketing) is being propped up by the GMail categories just silently ingesting tons of stuff that people never read or see (but also never unsubscribe from)
> I wonder how much of newsletter marketing (and paid email marketing) is being propped up by the GMail categories just silently ingesting tons of stuff that people never read or see (but also never unsubscribe from)
I don't know, gmail regularly tells me "you haven't opened an email from XYZ newsletter in a while, do you want to unsubscribe?", with a direct button to do so.
It does? I have never once seen this in my life.
Might be a mobile app / EU-based account only thing, but I've seen it numerous times and I'm almost certain I've seen it on the web version of Gmail too.
The only reason I am still using gmail is due to choice paralysis. I do not know which email service to choose and pay for. I do not like Proton. Is Fastmail the way to go? There is also the German one posteo. Should I just use Apple's mail? I'm taking suggestions if you have anything to share.
Fastmail; I moved nearly three years ago, and never regretted it. If you can stand the five-eyes aspect, of course.
Also, I use its under-publicized 10GB of free space (i.e., additional to the 10GB of mail space allowance) to more than comfortably host LDAP data such as my Joplin data, and Floccus bookmarks.
There is also another German: mailbox.org
Congrats, you have more choices now :P
I have positive experience with both posteo and mailbox.org.
I was always afraid to switch from Gmail, knowing the impact it would have. But I switched to Fastmail this year and my experience has been comparatively frictionless. My fear was unfounded.
That's great info. I need some encouragement to make the switch
I'm an iCloud+ subscriber and have moved a couple of my e-mail addresses across to use Apple's servers (about a year ago) for 'free'.
So far, it has worked consistently with no problems. The only annoyance is iyt doesn't seem that you can break multiple icloud-hosted mailboxes out into their own GUI mailboxes in the Mail client - they all get dumped into a Mailbox called 'Cloud'
I use fastmail for my and my family's mail, with many domains. It works fantastically, the android app and web app are very good, and it allows any settings, forwarding, clients, automation that I could think of.
The other features (files, file sharing, calendar) are also well designed and get out of your way.
Fastmail is the way. These are people for whom email is their job and focus and you get everything that comes with that, including good and responsive customer service.
But their servers are in the US.
So are the email servers used by the recipients of your emails, no? Almost everybody uses gmail, so even of you don't most of your email correspondence is going to end up, or originate from, on gmail servers anyway.
GDPR applies if you're in the EU regardless, but it would be nice to have it split like bitwarden[.eu].
I’m happy with https://soverin.net/ – they’re EU based, reasonably priced, and I only use them with external clients anyway.
I've been using mailbox.org for 5 years and like it very much. Cost some 3 EUR per month (actually there's a 50% discount this week).
Dead simple email that just works. Their webUI is fine, but I almost exclusively use it on iOS or macOS with the default mail app. They also have some other features (calendar, office suite, video calls) that I don't use. I really like the option to create up to 25 email aliases.
The first step is to get your own domain. You can set that up in Apple Mail at first if it’s most convenient. Then you can get everything moved over.
After that it’s much easier to move provider again.
How often do big providers like Gmail, customers of whom you will want to communicate with, eat the emails? I know that this is common if you run your own email server, and often just gone and not even to spam.
Google would probably justify this as security, and not necessarily unreasonably, but it has a clear anti-competitive effect too. The security concerns would be more credible if they made it easy to debug this, like giving a useful error message back to the sender stating what the missing security criteria are and having a clear process for appeals (like if you got unlucky with an IP address, or if you are missing a specific security measure on your domain).
Having your own domain connected to Apple Mail or Proton is fundamentally different than hosting your own email. Only the latter is at much risk of that.
I haven’t caught it happening, at least not so far.
I have my domain pointed at Apple Mail, though. That probably helps.
Another vote for Fastmail. Cannot fault, and honestly a joy to use (if that’s possible checking your email).
I’ve been happy with hey.com. No plans on switching.
Poor AI, reading all those ad emails...
With so many settings spread across multiple sections, especially in Workspace accounts, it's challenging to keep track of how existing settings are affected by each new addition. I generally review these regularly, yet find surprises now and then.
Knowing what setting does what in Gmail is becoming difficult by the day.
> Enabling the feature in Workspace says that “you agree to let Google Workspace use your Workspace content and activity to personalize your experience across Workspace,” according to the settings page, but according to Google, that does not mean handing over the content of your emails to use for AI training.
Google be like: "trust me bro"
User-facing software is full of language like that these days and I find it really frustrating, because it never helps answer the questions attentive people actually have, like will that mean my emails get dumped into the next Gemini training run?
If you are using Google Workspace you decided to trust them a while ago.
Maybe circumstances have changed? I certainly trusted 2008 Google a lot more than Google in 2025. It's really amazing to see a company just throw trust and goodwill out the window, even worse to see that it pays.
Some people worked on this. They don’t train on it directly. They use AI to rewrite the content “privacy-safe” then train on that….
Do you have any kind of source for that, or did you just make it up? If the latter, why?
So they *do* train on your emails then.
Ok.
That sounds very "privacy safe" ...