How many would turn them on if they defaulted to "Off"? Probably not enough to justify the development cost.

True but that is a function of ignorance too. There are plenty of good features in Gmail that are off by default, like undo / delayed send and keyboard shortcuts.

"Enable delay send - Allows you to undo sending emails for 5 minutes", I'd argue that a lot of people would enable that pretty fast.

Keyboard shortcuts probably would work like I'd expect, people like me would go "Hell no, no keyboard shortcuts in browser application EVER", and power users would opt into that in an instant.

Allow you to undo sending for 5 minutes means email delivery is delayed by 5 minutes.

It doesn't have to be 5 minutes. It could be 15 seconds. I've used that feature (in Fastmail), and find it very valuable.

I'm confused. Doesn't gmail offer an 'undo' for send by default ? At least for the last 5 years ? It's in General settings "Undo Send" and can be set up to 30 seconds ?

And before that it was under the Labs experimental features, I think I enabled it in the late 2000s.

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...

> 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.

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.

> 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.

Yes, any SaaS can change any feature at any time. Some companies have different motives though. We're not paying for GMail. When customers pay a monthly subscription and can cancel at any time, you usually want to keep them happy.

The internal motives are also different. Are employees promoted for just launching stuff? Are they running out of helpful features to launch?

> And this is generically true and always has been about every aspect of GMail?

In principle, but look at all the ways Gmail bends over backwards to keep ancient UI preferences working. You can configure it for different inbox presentations, different densities, snippets or not, images displayed or not, UI icons or text, you can disable and enable threading, you can put chat and meet on one side or not, you can have keyboard shortcuts or not, you can remap all the keyboard shortcuts if you use them, etc etc etc.

The point is to say that it’s bad and Google specifically can’t be trusted. It’s good to express disapproval of unethical business practices.

You can't self-host these days -- your emails will get stuck in every kind of spam filter there is, and you'll always have cause to wonder if your emails are received by their intended recipients, or lost to the abyss.

You've got to use either Gmail, Microsoft, Protonmail, etc. I don't love them, but Proton is probably the best of a bad bunch.

> You can't self-host these days -- your emails will get stuck in every kind of spam filter there is, and you'll always have cause to wonder if your emails are received by their intended recipients, or lost to the abyss.

this is not true unless you end up on an IP previously abused

if you don't want to take on the risk at all, there's email services for pennies / thousand emails

> if you don't want to take on the risk at all, there's email services for pennies / thousand emails

I'm seriously interested. Which ones would you recommend? Are they reliable?

Migadu, Fastmail, Protonmail, Zoho, Tutanota

These have all been running for many years and work fine, hell there's even the meme addresses at cock.li which has been running for over 10 years.

You don't need to be on a gmail account for reliable email.

I've had good luck with Contabo IPs

I do self host. The only problem I have is with MS, almost always with hotmail addresses.

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).

I suppose, to your point, Google doesn't have to make it optional in other countries... But that discrepancy would seem to have a lot of downside (maintenance, optics, docs) for little upside (...force adoption against the will of users who would go out of their way to opt out of they could?).