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Aside from their predictable subject lines and verbiage, there’s also one other thing that these [recent, AI generated] spam emails have in common: 99.9% come from GMail accounts. Once in a blue moon one will come from yahoo or aol or some other general mail service, but they are a rarity. Almost all of them are GMail. One one hand, congrats to Google, I suppose, for cornering the stand-alone email market so completely that even scammers are impressed with its ease of use. Surely that is some sort of sign of success.
On the other hand, if you are a person who relies on GMail as your primary email, this means that if you are trying to send me mail, you now run a much higher chance of being deposited into my spam folder. So much of the email I get from GMail accounts at this point is spam that an actual Gmail email, from an actual person, is statistically relatively rare. To be fair, if you write that email to me yourself with your own little fingers, your chances of hitting my actual inbox are pretty decent. But if you used GMail’s onboard “AI” to “help” you write that email, you are likely going directly to the spam folder. The GMail spam filter is now trained to recognize “AI” slop sentences, even those written by GMail itself. Yes, there is probably irony there.
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GMail’s been going gradually downhill for many years. It’s been a slow decline, compared to many enshittified services, but it’s still very-clearly happening. Aside from the long-established privacy/big data concerns – especially if you use any other Google services, or fail to block their Web trackers – they’ve just devolved into a service that doesn’t “wow” like it did when it was launched. It’s slow, it’s clunky, and it increasingly shovels AI down your throat, whether you want it or not.
If you own a domain name, you should already be using that as the domain of your email address, of course. This detaches your email address from any specific provider, which makes it much easier to change your email provider whenever you like: it puts the power in your hands. You can do this whether you’re using GMail or any other provider.
(If you don’t own a domain name, then perhaps you should.)
But beyond that: if you’re using GMail as your primary personal email service, you should shop around. Don’t let the weight of the inertia of your inbox stop you: there are plenty of ways to back that up, move it around, or just retain it as an archive in-place if you have no other choice.
I switched to Proton about ten or eleven years ago and I haven’t looked back. Are they perfect? No. Are they better than GMail? Absolutely; for me at least. But there are plenty of other options available for those for whom Proton is, perhaps, too-security-conscious. And switching to almost any of them reduces the risk that your messages start going to your recipients’ spam folders, as more and more spammers move to GMail for its AI features, which produce junk mail faster than ever before.
