Gmail AI gets more intrusive
43 comments
·November 7, 2025merelysounds
kyrra
This. You can disable all smart features (which includes things like mail categories, AI auto-complete, and most things that look at your emails).
Gear -> All Settings -> General tab (default) -> Smart features: Turn on smart features in Gmail, Chat, and Meet
Linked help page: https://support.google.com/mail/answer/15604322
mrweasel
How many would turn them on if they defaulted to "Off"? Probably not enough to justify the development cost.
pera
I really wished they would also let you disable those very annoying modal popups announcing yet-another-chatbot-integration twice a week: My company is already paying for your product, just let me do my work ffs...
echelon
> You can disable all smart features
For how long?
You don't own the platform. Google PMs may decide to roll it out to everyone at some point to hit numbers.
OJFord
Well, they're off by default in the countries mentioned in the top-level comment because they're legally required to be opt-in there (the implementation rather than the feature of course, but it couldn't really be otherwise).
ctoth
And this is generically true and always has been about every aspect of GMail?
What would you suggest people do. Self-host?
I'm just trying to understand why you posted this. It's generically true. Any company can change anything at any point. May as well just pack it up boys.
adriand
I would really love it if there was a "smart setting" (or a dumb setting) to prevent people from sending me their drip marketing spam. The spam filtering in my personal Gmail is adequate, if not perfect (I really don't understand how the constant life insurance spam is getting through). But my main client uses Google Workspace or GSuite or whatever it is called these days, and my inbox for that email features a constant barrage of drip campaign garbage.
Are Google's incentives misaligned in some way here? It's not like the heuristics are particularly difficult for this kind of email. Some of it even has unsubscribe links (I didn't subscribe), or, "If you don't want to hear from me again, just let me know", etc.
reaperducer
Some of it even has unsubscribe links (I didn't subscribe), or, "If you don't want to hear from me again, just let me know", etc.
I don't know if this counts as "drip marketing" (a new term to me), but just this week Apple spammed me with some Apple Card offer for Hertz car rentals.
No way to unsubscribe. No link. No mention of unsubscribing at all. And on the Apple Card web site, no way to turn off marketing emails.
I wish you could still report these spam's to the FTC.
protoster
This is often the case with Google products because the A/B testing is rampant.
jeffbee
[flagged]
andrewl-hn
I run my email via imap and haven't seen GMail web UI for at least 15 years. Apple does some minor changes to Mail app but generally they follow "if it ain't broke don't fix it" motto, and I really appreciate that. Besides, I have email from Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, and FastMail in the same app, and I really appreciate that all email for me looks the same.
dmd
Good for you. 9999 out of 10,000 people don't know what a "gmail web UI" is, or even that there's something called email that is separate from the gmail web interface.
justsomehnguy
> web interface.
Bold of you to think they know what is this.
I have seen enough people who wholeheartedly though the things in their phone stays in it and you lose access to them if you move to another phone.
notatoad
am i missing something here, or is this really just a random two-sentence gripe from some random guy, complaining about something that nobody else can reproduce?
"dave is mad at gmail". okay dave.
reaperducer
am i missing something here, or is this really just a random two-sentence gripe from some random guy, complaining about something that nobody else can reproduce?
You have just summarized HN, and most of social media and the blogosphere, in 2025.
verdverm
100% Google has been making their AI more intrusive and in your face across all their portfolio. It's not just Google, Atlassian is doing the same
With search in gcloud, the drop-down top 2/3 is ai calls to action. Completely useless because their suggestions are so bad and for such basic tasks that I never do.
It feels like in platform advertising.
I've left them feedback, and since they've only doubled down, am now reducing my spend
Moving to Cloudflare, if you're curious
dangoor
Cloudflare has a gmail competitor?
pflenker
Tangentially related, the AI integrated in Google Chat is hilariously bad. Find a thread which starts with „Bug: (…)“ that has 90+ answers. Hey, an AI could be useful here! Click summarize. Wait. Without fail the result will be along the lines of „X, Y and Z discuss a bug.“
londons_explore
It would be fine if you could then reply with 'no, please tell me about the nature of the bug not the people involved', and then have it remember that forever.
However nearly nobody seems to correctly implement this user-wide memory.
NelsonMinar
Could use a more reliable source for this report.
I paid for and tried Google AI for Gmail and was appalled at how bad it is. The product team there is really not executing well. I've switched now to Shortwave. It works very well and having LLM+RAG queries for 20+ years of email archives has been very helpful to me.
psygn89
Can it can help answer my questions on behalf of my clients that use gmail?
apparent
And yet google's spam filters still let through so much AI slop spam. Any email from a new sender should be suspect, and if it has an awkwardly phrased opt-out line ("if you'd rather not hear from me again, just shoot me a "leave out"") then it should presumptively be marked as spam.
azhenley
This is why I am building a better AI for my inbox.
charlieyu1
A client emailed me for a meeting at Monday 2pm. The Gmail AI immediately marked Monday 2am on my calendar and it cannot even be deleted.
pinkmuffinere
Wow i really hope this is a mistake, that sounds like a severe bug
warkdarrior
Bizarre, I can always delete things from my calendar. It sounds like an implementation bug. Did you report it?
ebiester
Since when did Google pay attention to implementation bugs?
spankalee
All the time? I used to work there and teams definitely see user-reported bugs. If you get one that's as severe as "I can't delete a calendar event" you respond to that very quickly.
observationist
[dead]
IncreasePosts
Did the user accidentally keep hitting Alt+H? Or are they part of some experiment? Gmail writes nothing for me unless I click the "help me write" link. I also don't know why it is so hard to record a screenshot of the behavior, you can write it to example@example.com, and the draft email UI can be clipped from where it shows your email address.
gs17
> Gmail writes nothing for me unless I click the "help me write" link.
For me it sometimes (I'm not sure why, it isn't even "intelligent" about which emails have options, automatic noreply@ emails sometimes have it) has buttons to pre-fill a reply with a message out of a few choices. It's not unprompted, but I could see someone accidentally clicking it instead of the reply button.
spankalee
Yeah, I don't know what he's talking about.
I see obviously AI-powered tab-completion suggestions, and the Alt-H prompt suggestion when first writing an email, but I've never had it actually insert text unprompted.
renewiltord
Yeah, you gotta watch out for this stuff. The other day I was using Gmail when it just gave me a million dollars. I gave it to charity under an assumed name.
Can’t screenshot without revealing the name but I think it’s actually super cool of Google to do this. Just distributed charity. With no benefit to themselves.
They did say that they did it based on my Google Photos showing that I was really good looking (can’t share because of privacy) so there’s some privacy stuff there but overall I think it’s good.
cpursley
I’ve found the email thread summary pretty useful ymmv.
Anecdotally, I don’t see any of this. I have all “smart” features in gmail turned off; there is an option like this in the settings.
Google’s Help: https://support.google.com/mail/answer/15604322
Also relevant:
> By default, smart feature settings are off if you live in: The European Economic Area, Japan, Switzerland, United Kingdom