Carbon Chemist

Tag: gmail

  • Google Gemini Can Summarize Your Emails in Gmail. Should You Use It?

    Google Gemini Can Summarize Your Emails in Gmail. Should You Use It?

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    Artificial intelligence is now busy tackling some of the biggest problems to face humankind: Speeding up drug design, tackling cancer detection, and finding solutions to climate change. However, none of these issues are arguably as daunting as the task Google has set its Gemini AI bot on.

    Specifically, the task of staying on top of your inbox. Gemini is now a part of Gmail on the web and on mobile devices, and as well as using it to find the right words in your emails, you can also get it to summarize long emails and threads for you.

    Here I’ll show you how these summary tools work and what else Gemini can do for you—and report on just how reliable it is at the moment. One caveat though: For now, Gemini in Gmail is only available if you or your employer are paying for Google One AI Premium ($20 a month), or for a Google Workspace account.

    Get Gemini Summaries in Gmail

    Gemini can summarize single emails or lots of them.

    Gemini can summarize single emails, or lots of them.David Nield

    There are a few ways to get Gemini summaries in Gmail, if the feature is enabled for your account. Most of them can be accessed through the Gemini logo, which is a distinctive black star shape. On the web, click the Gemini button in the top right corner of Gmail to bring up the side panel. There, you can see summaries for your inbox as a whole, or for the particular thread you have open.

    In Gmail for Android and iOS, the Gemini button shows up in the top right corner if you’re looking at a list of emails, or in the center at the top if you’re viewing a particular thread. On mobile, there’s also a specific Summarize this email button that appears when you’re looking at a single email or a single thread of emails.

    That Summarize this email button is the easiest way to get started, but you can also tell Gemini to “summarize today’s emails,” “summarize this week’s emails,” “summarize my unread emails,” or “summarize the emails I got last month”—anything along those lines. After Gemini spends a few moments thinking, you’ll get a response on screen, together with follow-up questions you might want to ask. (You can request a longer summary, for instance.)

    The results will be presented as a series of bullet points, with Sources underneath: Click or tap on these sources to see the individual emails the information was pulled from. Using the icons alongside the responses, you’re also able to copy the text elsewhere, give thumbs up or thumbs down feedback on the Gemini response, or clear the AI chat history.

    Ask Gemini Other Questions in Gmail

    There's more to Gemini than summaries.

    There’s more to Gemini than summaries.David Nield

    I’m mostly focusing on the summary capabilities of Gemini in Gmail here, but there are plenty of other commands you can explore. In fact, you can ask Gemini just about any question you like about what’s in your inbox, and it will at least attempt to provide a response—scouring through the gigabytes of data in your emails looking for answers.

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  • My Memories Are Just Meta’s Training Data Now

    My Memories Are Just Meta’s Training Data Now

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    In R. C. Sherriff’s novel The Hopkins Manuscript, readers are transported to a world 800 years after a cataclysmic event ended Western civilization. In pursuit of clues about a blank spot in their planet’s history, scientists belonging to a new world order discover diary entries in a swamp-infested wasteland formerly known as England. For the inhabitants of this new empire, it is only through this record of a retired school teacher’s humdrum rural life, his petty vanities and attempts to breed prize-winning chickens, that they begin to learn about 20th-century Britain.

    If I were to teach futuristic beings about life on earth, I once believed I could produce a time capsule more profound than Sherriff’s small-minded protagonist, Edgar Hopkins. But scrolling through my decade-old Facebook posts this week, I was presented with the possibility that my legacy may be even more drab.

    Earlier this month, Meta announced that my teenage status updates were exactly the kind of content it wants to pass on to future generations of artificial intelligence. From June 26, old public posts, holiday photos, and even the names of millions of Facebook and Instagram users around the world would effectively be treated as a time capsule of humanity and transformed into training data.

    That means my mundane posts about university essay deadlines (“3 energy drinks down 1,000 words to go”) as well as unremarkable holiday snaps (one captures me slumped over my phone on a stationary ferry) are about to become part of that corpus. The fact that these memories are so dull, and also very personal, makes Meta’s interest more unsettling.

    The company says it is only interested in content that is already public: private messages, posts shared exclusively with friends, and Instagram Stories are out of bounds. Despite that, AI is suddenly feasting on personal artifacts that have, for years, been gathering dust in unvisited corners of the internet. For those reading from outside Europe, the deed is already done. The deadline announced by Meta applied only to Europeans. The posts of American Facebook and Instagram users have been training Meta AI models since 2023, according to company spokesperson Matthew Pollard.

    Meta is not the only company turning my online history into AI fodder. WIRED’s Reece Rogers recently discovered that Google’s AI search feature was copying his journalism. But finding out which personal remnants exactly are feeding future chatbots was not easy. Some sites I’ve contributed to over the years are hard to trace. Early social network Myspace was acquired by Time Inc. in 2016, which in turn was acquired by a company called Meredith Corporation two years later. When I asked Meredith about my old account, they replied that Myspace had since been spun off to an advertising firm, Viant Technology. An email to a company contact listed on its website was returned with a message that the address “couldn’t be found.”

    Asking companies still in business about my old accounts was more straightforward. Blogging platform Tumblr, owned by WordPress owner Automattic, said unless I’d opted out, the public posts I made as a teenager will be shared with “a small network of content and research partners, including those that train AI models” per a February announcement. YahooMail, which I used for years, told me that a sample of old emails—which have apparently been “anonymized” and “aggregated”—are being “utilized” by an AI model internally to do things like summarize messages. Microsoft-owned LinkedIn also said my public posts were being used to train AI although some “personal” details included in those posts were excluded, according to a company spokesperson, who did not specify what those personal details were.

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  • How to Delete Your Google Account—After Downloading All of Your Data First

    How to Delete Your Google Account—After Downloading All of Your Data First

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    Deleting digital accounts that you rarely or never use not only reduces the amount of clutter in your online life—it keeps you safer too. Every extra account you’ve got is an extra target for a hacker, an extra database that might leak, and an extra way that someone might get access to some of your bigger, more important accounts. If you want to minimize your exposure, keep open only the accounts you need.

    When it comes to deleting a Google account, the process isn’t difficult or long-winded, and Google will even let you download your data first. Bear in mind that deleting a Google account wipes out everything associated with your Google username, from the emails in Gmail, to the places you’ve saved in Google Maps, to the files you’ve saved to Google Drive.

    It’s also worth noting that Google shuts down accounts automatically if they haven’t been used for two years, primarily for the security reasons that we’ve already mentioned. If you go to delete a Google account and find that it’s already gone, this might be why—though Google does send plenty of warnings in advance. You can read more about Google’s inactive account deletion policy if you think this has happened to your account.

    Downloading Your Data

    Screenshot of Gmail settingsa

    Select the types of data you want to export from your account.

    Google via David Nield

    Head to your Google account page on the web, and you’ll see a Data and privacy link on the left: Click on this to get an overview of all the data Google has on you (which might be more than you realized). To get your data off Google’s servers and on to your local computer, follow the Download your data link toward the bottom of the page.

    The next screen lets you select the types of data you want to export. It includes data from across all of Google’s apps and services, including browsing history saved in Chrome, your Google Calendar appointments, photos and videos in Google Photos, videos you’ve uploaded to YouTube, and your Google Chat logs. It shows you the full scope of all the data that’ll be wiped when you delete your Google account.

    For busier Google accounts, there can be a daunting amount of material here. Use the checkboxes to select the categories of data you’d like to download: The Select all and Deselect all options at the top might help. Some entries in the list have options beneath them to let you pick between different export formats, and to select particular subsections of data (such as activity categories in Google Fit) to download.

    When you’re happy with your selection, click the Next step button. You then have to choose how you want to get your download. You can get a download link over email, or have the archive sent straight to a cloud storage account. You’re also able to set up recurring downloads of the selected data, which you’re not going to want to do if you’re deleting your Google account.

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  • How to Free Up Space in Gmail, Google Photos, and Google Drive

    How to Free Up Space in Gmail, Google Photos, and Google Drive

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    How many unread emails do you have right now? Sixty? Six thousand? Well, all of those messages and attachments take up space, whether they’re unread, old, or archived. And if you’re on Gmail and aren’t one of those weird inbox zero people who stays on top of things, you might be running out of space.

    If Google’s got its Gmail hooks into you, there’s a good chance you’re also invested in the other parts of Google’s Cloud ecosystem—Drive and Photos. Google used to be a bastion of infinite storage space—once offering unlimited room for photos and emails. But now the company has been a lot more strict about counting the megabytes you use across its services. Soon, even WhatsApp backups may count against your storage allotment.

    Google gives users 15 GB of digital storage for free. That includes everything in Gmail, Google Drive, and any uncompressed images stored in Google Photos. It’s a lot of free space, but if you get invested in the Google ecosystem—especially if your Android phone automatically backs up your data to Google’s cloud—you might find that you fill it up quickly. Once you hit the cap, you won’t be able to add anything to Google Drive, save new photos, or even send or receive emails. Google sends warnings when you’re running low, but those are easy to miss, and they often leave users scrambling to free up some space. Here’s how to avoid finding yourself in that position.

    Before you start, see where you stand: Google’s Storage page will show you how much space you’ve taken up across Drive, Gmail, and Photos.

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    The simplest way to free up Gmail space is to batch delete just about every damn thing in your inbox. Go to your Promotions tab and the Social tab at the top of your inbox, check the box in the top left corner to select all messages, then click Delete. (It’s the button that looks like a trash can, of course). The only problem with this method is that there are likely messages in there you want to keep. If you do much of your shopping online, for instance, it’s good to keep all your receipts. Luckily, there are a couple easy ways to sift through the mess and keep only what you need.

    One method, suggested by WIRED senior writer Lily Hay Newman, is to curate your bulk deletions by email address. Even if they come from the same company, spam messages are often sent from a different email address than the actually useful info like receipts or order information. For example, PayPal sends receipts from [email protected], while its marketing blasts (“Sign up for PayPal credit NOW!”) come from [email protected]. Shipping info from Amazon comes via [email protected]. Spam comes from the likes of [email protected] and [email protected]. As soon as you figure out which email addresses can be safely disregarded, you can delete them all without purging the stuff you want to keep. Just copy and paste the offending email address into the search bar and batch delete everything that pops up.

    Another method (this one comes from former WIRED one Peter Rubin) is to sort your emails by file size. In the Gmail search bar, type “size:10mb” or “larger:10mb” (or whatever size you want) to bring up emails with attachments that exceed the size you define in the search. You’ll still have to go through and select what you want to delete, but at least it brings all the big emails together in one place. Your best bet would be to start big and work your way down.

    Garbage Day

    After deleting the thousands of emails you’ve filtered out, you may notice that your storage hasn’t budged. Though you may have thrown everything into the trash, you still have to empty the bin itself. Unlike your garbage IRL, if you just leave them sitting there in Gmail’s trash, your trashed emails will be deleted automatically after 30 days. But if your goal is to free up space, it’s best to take care of that purge manually. (Also, you have a chance to double-check to make sure nothing important got tossed into the trash by accident.)

    Look for the trash can inside the left sidebar in Gmail and click on it. (If you don’t see it, click on More to expand the menu to show the trash icon.) Once inside your trash, you can just click Empty Trash Now near the top of the screen and everything will vanish into the digital underworld. Finally, you can revel in all your newfound space.

    Drive Angry

    Still don’t have enough room? Well, Gmail isn’t the only storage hog in the Google Suite. Google Drive and Google Photos can fill up quickly if you upload images or other files in their full quality. If you use Photos, go into your settings and make sure that your upload quality is set to Storage saver. (This used to be called High Quality but Google, as it is wont to do, changed the name.) Keep in mind this means the images will be compressed into Google’s own space-saving but still high-resolution format, while Original means they’ll stay in the (usually better) resolution you shot them in.

    Every Google Drive account has a storage dashboard you can use to monitor your usage. The landing page shows all of your files in a list, and clicking on the arrow next to “Storage used” on the right side will sort the list by file size, showing the biggest files at the top. It might also help to take a look at your “Shared with me” folder to look for large files or folders. You never know when someone might have shared 4 GB of very important photos.

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