After 16 years, a developer quit Gmail over its AI: 'it thinks I can't write my own email'
Sixteen years in, the unsolicited summaries, auto-drafts and the endless 'Help me write' nags pushed a long-time Gmail user to move his mail to Fastmail on his own domain. The thread turned into a referendum on AI you can't switch off.
What finally made a 16-year Gmail user leave
The original post isn't about price or reliability — it's about tone. After 16 years on Gmail, the author moved to Fastmail on a custom domain because the product started behaving as if he were incapable of handling his own email: message summaries generated without being asked, reply drafts inserted automatically, and a persistent prompt to hit / for Help me write and Tab to 'improve' what he'd already written.
His thesis lands in one line: "The message you're sending is that you think I'm not capable of reading and writing my own emails." He calls it software that feels like it's actively trying to be disrespectful.
The features you can't quietly turn off
The sharper complaint underneath the rant is about consent. Several of the AI behaviors can't be disabled in isolation — switching them off means giving up long-standing, genuinely useful functionality like thread categorization in the same toggle. So the choice isn't 'AI on/off', it's 'AI plus the features you actually liked, or neither'.
The thread: 'if it were useful, they wouldn't have to force it'
The 733-comment thread kept circling one argument. As one reader put it, if these features were as desirable as the marketing says, they wouldn't need to be promoted this aggressively — the adoption would be organic.
"I can appreciate LLMs for some use cases, but writing emails for the user is the one that really baffles me. The amount of native speakers reaching for it is wild." — a commenter unconvinced by AI compose
A few people pushed back on the absolutism: a one-click "that time works for me" reply is fine; what grates is the editor second-guessing prose you already wrote.
The kill switch, and the exits
The most-upvoted practical reply isn't a rant at all — it's a fix. A commenter pointed to the off switch most people miss: Gmail Settings → General → disable the global smart features option, which strips out a large chunk of the AI at once.
For those leaving anyway, a Fastmail user in the thread made the unpaid pitch: app passwords, hide-my-email, iOS integration — feature parity with Gmail, minus the nagging. Whether 'turn off one setting' or 'change providers' wins, the signal for Google is the same: the AI nudges are pushing at least some of its most technical users toward the door.
Lumafield CT-scanned a BYD, and an owner in the thread caught the teardown getting a detail wrong
Lumafield's 'Scan of the Month' put a BYD's battery, key fob and switchgear under an industrial CT scanner to show how far the company's vertical integration runs. Then a BYD owner read the writeup and corrected it.