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It also disables autocomplete or even history in the search. What a mess!

This is also what happened if you opted out of Google using your data to train AI months ago, basically you lost access to all smart features as punishment

Yeah that happened to me too 😡 Silver lining in my case though: I've been meaning to migrate to Protonmail for years at this point but never got around to it, but this was exactly the push I needed lol, thanks google 👋

Those f*ckers!!!

Google bragging about AI Overview (which cannot be disabled except through third party extensions/hacks) having "2 billion users every month."

Gmail was scanning your mail to do that sort even before it added these new "features." It was always bad.

So this is why I’m suddenly getting a notification for every single email and have 120,000 unread

Same thing happened to me. RAGE.

Maybe this enshitification will have a positive side effect. Maybe the mass “unsubscribe” activity by so many users will show these companies that WE DON’T ACTUALLY READ THEIR SHIT and they’ll cut it out.

And there's no way to remove Gemini icon from the top search bar. You can select the browser default to web, but... =(

YUP. Pissed about that.

It didn't delete them. It just hides them.

A scam and a set up

I'm pissed as fuck about that fr

Spell check is a "smart feature". Fucking spell check. The thing that's been functional without an internet connection for some 30 or more years now. My hatred of tech companies continues to grow.

Download Unroll me and it serves the same function as the old tabs did

that is just to punish people no other reason. fucking bullshit. though it does help me move off gmail at last

So it's either "smart" features or nothing, which is just dumb.

No, actually, the filters/tags did not get removed. I am not sure what the tabs are. I’m sorry that happened to you!

This is infuriating

Yeah, noticed that too. Highly irritating; I guess I got used to that pre-sort for SO MANY YEARS.

Bruh what?!

I am also raging and trying to figure out what I can do to improve the sorting of my inbox. I have a bunch of filters so I don't miss important emails from my kids' schools, but I can't figure out how to make an "Inbox Section" that includes multiple filters.

Longer term will prolly switch to Proton

They attached the spell checker to AI too. A basic feature.

Crap, where does all of that crap go now? Because sometimes confirmations for things I ordered end up in "promotions" 🥴

You don't want ai??? Well we're gonna stomp our feet and make your inbox worse!! Every email from your doctor to Walmart is going to pile up in the same place! Get ready to lose important emails in minutes as they're pushed down by oil change ads! You want AI nooooowww??

Thank you!

It won’t even let you use spell check!! 😡

Mine too. And the info text says that I can only have the tabs back If I enable the smart fraturas WTF?????

bsky.app/profile/laur...

I don't use them but I clearly remember shoved into my inboxes years before AI crap happened??? Out of curiosity, I checked. I still have em but perhaps only as an archive view only?

They want to be assholes since you don't want to comply with AI.

Yeah, it’s a big FU to people who just don’t want AI scanning their emails. I will be systematically deleting thousands of emails in the coming weeks.

ugh. More and more spam/promotion were making it through their inbox filtering into my general inbox anyway. Maybe it's time for me to rip the bandaid off and make a switch to protonmail.

It also knocks out your Priority Inbox setting, which predates even those tabs. There's no reason for these to be tied together.

It's a worse spellchecker, too. I need to do emails in a few different languages a day, and old one was pretty good at naturally swapping between them. I started getting spelling suggestions to change Catalan words to English they vaguely resembled this week, and just this morning found out why ^^^

They do that on purpose because adoption of this AI garbage is terrible and not enough people will use it if they aren't forced into it, and without adoption they can't justify their spending.

I just tested it and my browser's built in spellchecker still seems to work.

THIS is what infuriates me, is the spell checker no longer working.

It looks like malwarebytes updates their blog confirming my suspicion, and that their previous reporting was inaccurate. Hoping folks whose email inboxes became harder to use don't have to suffer.

AI/Machine Learning was *always* used to classify email categories, since the feature was first introduced (this would be true for any email provider doing automatic classification, not just gmail).

I don't trust this fine line considering it is using data from chats and rolling out other features as well. I don't recall getting an updated privacy policy. arstechnica.com/ai/2025/08/g...

They say. It very much appears that "we don't train AI on this!" has, at this point, surpassed greenwashing as a topic of corporate lying.

It's part of enshittification process--they get you dependent on some feature, then make it contingent on some bullshit stealing of your stuff.

Sounds like a headache but it does look like it didn't delete the actual emails, just the feature that sorts them? Am I correct? (That's bad enough, like 100% asshole move, but the alternative would surely get them sued.)

Yes, they disappear from the top bar, but it seems you can still access them from the list on the left

Thank you for sharing this information! 🙏

I recommend Proton, personally. They've got a VPN service as well.

Losing Inbox was the beginning of the end

I'll be following this, as I just had the exact same experience - turned off "smart" features and all the pre-existing category tabs went away, leaving all my emails in one big clump! 😡

Yup - it's the full douche move. "Oh you want that feature? Well then we need access to everything of yours." F that. I'll live without it.

i was suffering delirium until i read this now im so fucking mad

Nice 😅

Extortion via enshitification. We will see more of this. Use our AI or suffer.

Good to know, though the sorting is not exactly the same, sadly.

Also gone: Spelling and Grammar checks, Autocorrect, Package tracking. I am all-in on the use of the major tabs! Damn...

I didn't realize I lost all my tabs. Damn it. This is so stupid.

I'm so mad that they tied that to AI when they clearly don't need to, since we had it for years without!

Does that include attachments?

Luckily it seems these folders still exist, it just doesn't auto-filter. But I still have a "promotions" folder on the sidebar. I can go in, tell it to select every message in the folder, and just mass delete. It will take a while but seems to be working.

I noticed my storage utilization went down about 10% too, not sure what's up with that. Enshitification complete though

Thanks for the tip!

Sadly, that's (Google Workspace options) a separate checklist from personal emails.

Thank you. Done.

Thank you for this PSA!

the shit i joked about with my middle school classmates became real, i remember back when we first got a "smart" board and we started calling it the dumb board cuz it barely worked and like 15 years later now we're getting ai everywhere that breaks everything good

Thanks a lot MonicaValentinelli--very helpful post. What should I do about "dynamic email?" Should I turn that off as well?

ENHANCE!

I can't find anything now!

thanks, i tried it, but since i've had gmail since 2007 and just never bothered with deleting stuff... this isn't working for me, unfortunately !! thanks for explaining.

If this works you are my hero.

yeah, that made a mess of things.

That didn't work. I don't get it at the top, but it is still on the left-hand menu. Any other suggestions? I'm on a MacBook Air

You mean I could have disabled those and nobody told me?

they aren't user labels, they're built-in categories. you can also add "OR is:starred" to your workaround primary inbox category to emulate the original behavior

Nice~!

Unfortunately, new emails won't be labelled automatically

*default

Alt, is that you are seeing the full inbox at the top of your email. You can rearrange the order of where the multiple inboxes appear to be above, below, or beside. I have mine set as above.

Huh. I'll have to mess with it--mine definitely wasn't normal. I've switched it back for the moment, and am deleting all my promotions so at least those don't get carried over somehow. I think it might be time to move on from gmail.....

If you don't need the tabs across the top, you can just go into settings/labels and set Updates, Social, Forums etc to 'Show' and they will appear again, with all their contents, on the left under Inbox, Starred, Snooze etc

Can you edit your original post to add a warning about losing your categories? I didn't see that until afterwards and now I'm trying to get them back...

Didn't work for me, sadly. No tabs, functionally no changes. Still cluttered. Having this feature locked behind Smart BS is so fucking dumb.

thank you!

I did this. I added Promotions as well. Set up Primary to stack above Inbox. The problem is now that Smart features is off Gmail is no longer marking new emails a promotions. So old email from merchants is still a promotion but new is not.

Yeah, some clarification. It doesn't recreate the tabs as they were at the top like before, just the general functionality ( filtered groups of emails). Also you can adjust the number of emails you see in the settings (it doesn't have to be 9). But you are right, this is not to remake the tabs. sry.

found it mistakenly selected general setting first, when I should have selected my email address tricky little fuckers

🙏 done!

Thank you

That article has no basis. It cites a tweet. The tweet cites nothing, because it's just made up.

Also, do it for every account. I have one for personal and one for biz and had to do that for each separately.

switch to Proton.

thank you!

Thank you!!!

Thank you.