Yes, that's annoying. I have no interest in connecting my phone number to accounts here and there.

Some firms go the other way.. I use the "Line" app for communication, and initially (many years ago) it was connected to your phone, which caused difficulties if you moved countries (among other things).

They have, however, now removed the connection to a phone number. Good.

That starts to sound like "It's a nice email you have there.. too bad if something should happen to it.."

I never see any "Press / for.." or anything like that. I rejected all the 'smart' features when gmail one day popped up an announcement about them.

I've seen those categorizations used, and to me they're totally useless. I instead filter messages in the Filter settings, and apply labels and other things as I wish. This works exactly as I need it, unlike the Google categorizations.

This seems to be caused by "smart features" enabled in settings, and can be turned off. When they were introduced they popped up in gmail and you could choose to accept or reject, I of course rejected all of them (nothing good could possibly come from accepting), so I've never had any of the issues mentioned in the blog post.

Somewhat off-topic, but also a followup.. I'm worried I'll be "kicked out" of gmail as well, at least on my mobile gmail device.. an Android tablet. I have an old one which doesn't receive Android updates anymore, gmail works perfectly fine in Opera (and Vivaldi). I have a newer Android tablet, I bought it to be ready when the day came that the old one doesn't work for some reason, or an app won't work and can't be updated (due to too old Android - and in fact there are a few of those already).

The problem? The browsers work fine on everything on the new tablet, EXCEPT gmail. Whenever I try gmail, in Opera or Vivaldi (same versions as on the old tablet), I get something along the lines of "the site can't be found". As if wifi was off. (paraphrased, I don't have one in front of me). Been like that forever. It's baffling.

I use filters for categorization, where neeeded. Been doing that for years and it does what I need. I don't see any value in google doing it for me, when I can set the filters just as I want them.

My wife translated some text she had written in her own language to my native language, as she didn't feel she could do it. I found grammar errors, surprising ones. I found places where pronouns were used so far into the sentence that a reader would be lost finding what that pronoun actually referred to. And more. In the end I rewrote the LLM-generated text myself, many pages of it.

Research on LLMs show that they so far can't summarize. They fake it by just extracting stuff, i.e. making the text shorter. They, as you found, can't understand intent. Or what's actually important. I never read summaries generated by AIs, it's a waste of time, and worse.

I don't see any of those (horribly-sounding) AI "helpers" when I read or write messages in gmail. I tried it again just now, to make sure that nothing had changed since yesterday. I do remember clicking through some suggested "feature improvements" a while ago and saying "No" to all of them. Can't really remember what it was though. Can it be that the author has some option enabled in settings somewhere which allows this? Or is this something GMail is (forcibly) gradually rolling out? If so, shudder.

EditUpdate: After reading another comment, this must have been a bunch of "smart features" which gmail suggested a while ago. I just, as I said, refused all of them. So they're available in Settings somewhere. Find, turn off.