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ZDNET’s key takeaways
- Trust isn’t the issue; Gemini in Gmail just lacks usefulness.
- AI Overviews often omit context that power users actually need.
- Smarter message flow control remains Gmail’s biggest gap.
Everyone uses email differently. Our experiences relate directly to our relationships, the kind of work we do, the mail flow we have, and what we want to accomplish. I’m saying this so you know that while Gemini in Gmail isn’t right for me, at least not yet, it might be just fine for you.
I also want to talk about Gmail and security. For years, I ran my own email servers. In fact, way back in the day, when cc:Mail was a thing, an email “server” was really a cluster of machines. I had a full cluster on a rack in my office. Eventually, I moved off physical hardware to the cloud. I’ve been happily letting Google worry about server management for quite some time.
I long ago accepted the fact that Google would, technically, have access to all my email. It’s certainly possible the company might mine that data for some nefarious purpose. It’s also clear that Google’s security practices are far better than anything I’d ever be able to set up on my own servers.
While there’s always some concern over the possibility of a breach, I have no problem using Google’s infrastructure to manage my email. I protect my account with multifactor authentication and passkeys. I am fairly sure Google itself won’t abuse its privileged access.
The fact is this: I don’t use Gemini in Gmail not because I don’t trust Gemini. I don’t use Gemini in Gmail because it’s just not yet particularly useful. In fact, as far back as 2023, I outlined ways AI could help Gmail manage my inbox.
AI has come a long way since 2023. I now want even more. But, at least from my perspective, Google’s AI features for Gmail are just too weak and not ready for prime time.
AI in Gmail today
As of this writing, there are five(ish) AI-specific features baked into Gmail:
- Suggested responses
- Help me write
- AI Overviews for email threads
- AI queries in search
- Proofread
- AI Inbox (rolling out to “trusted testers”)
Suggested responses and Help me write
Suggested responses and Help me write are the core generative AI features for writing emails. Suggested responses are generated automatically as you compose an email. Help me write is a mode that can be initiated when you type the / key. For this feature, you prompt Gmail about what you want to say. Gmail will then write out your message.
Also: I let Gemini Deep Research dig through my Gmail and Drive – here’s what it uncovered
For those folks for whom writing is difficult, these are enormously helpful features. Because I write so much and it’s such a natural act, I find that reading and revising the words Gmail writes for me takes more time than it would for me to dash off an email on my own. So I just don’t use them.
AI Overviews for email threads
One feature I had high hopes for is AI Overviews for email threads. You know how threads go. There can be tens or even hundreds of back-and-forth email messages, all in one thread. It’s sometimes quite difficult to figure out the status of the issue being discussed in the thread. The AI overview feature displays its idea of a quick overview of the entire thread discussion.
Also: Can Google save Apple AI? Gemini to power a new, personalized Siri
Here’s an example. I often work with vendors as project partners for my YouTube channel. In this case, I’ve been talking to a vendor across 15 messages about getting spools of 3D printing filament for a planned project. What’s frustrating about this overview is that it’s inaccurate. The vendor and I actually agreed to five spools, not the four that Gemini reported in its overview.
I’d love to know what the three other colors we agreed on are, but they aren’t included in the overview. One piece of information the overview did provide, two green spools, is something I could have easily found on my own, since it’s in the second line of the very top email.
Also: I tried Gemini’s ‘scheduled actions’ to automate my AI – the potential is enormous (but Google has work to do)
There is one trick to this. You can click the caret icon repeatedly, and Gmail will regenerate the AI overview, often with new information. So if you need the feature, try regenerating and see what it will produce for you.
Find information sidebar
You can, however, query the thread to find out more. This isn’t done in the overview, but by using the sidebar. You get to the sidebar by clicking the star icon next to the settings icon at the top of the screen.
You can see that I toggled the AI overview and got a slightly different summary at the top of the screenshot. You can also see that I was able to query the thread and get a good response to which spools are being sent.
Also: Gemini vs. Copilot: I compared the AI tools on 7 everyday tasks, and there’s a clear winner
This can be genuinely useful. For example, when I asked it, “who are the Google PR people I usually talk to,” Gemini responded with a fairly good list of contacts. It also provided clickable links that took me to messages from those people.
Proofread and AI inbox
I don’t yet have access to these two new features, either in my free Gmail account or my corporate Google Workspace account, even though I have a $20 per month Pro AI subscription. Perhaps it’s not fully rolled out yet.
Proofread is Gmail’s answer to Grammarly. It highlights sections of text that could benefit from a rewrite and provides alternative ways of phrasing. While my editors certainly think I could benefit from a rephrase here and there, it’s not really a feature I see myself using all that often.
Also: Inside the making of Gemini 3 – how Google’s slow and steady approach won the AI race (for now)
Then there’s the AI inbox, announced just recently. Google says this feature is rolling out to “trusted testers.” It’s apparently a new way for you to look at your inbox, providing a view that’s summary and overview based, rather than a list of messages.
Google tried a version of this idea back in 2014, calling it Inbox by Gmail. The feature was killed off in 2019. I’m just not sure that folks like the idea of an algorithmic overview of messages, with the actual messages still living in the inbox, just to lay about. I think people really want to gain control over the actual message stream.
But we’ll see. I haven’t tried this new feature out, so I can’t really judge it yet.
I want Gmail to manage my message flow
What I really want is an intelligent agent that processes my message flow. I want to be able to work with an agent that’s always watching my emails, can distinguish between the various types of messages I manage, can sort and process those messages, and more.
For example, I get hundreds to thousands of press releases dropped in my email inbox each week. If there’s a big event going on, the traffic goes up. While my filters do a fair job of processing all those messages, and I’ve tried to train my categories, i.e., Primary, Promotions, Social, Updates, and Forums, I really want more.
Also: Want better Gemini responses? Try these 10 tricks, Google says
Filters based on text strings can only go so far. What I’d like to be able to do is tell Gmail to filter all press releases into a folder, but if I get a pitch from Google, OpenAI, or Microsoft about new programming tools, to let me know. That level of sophistication would be enormously useful, but isn’t possible now.
I’d also like Gmail to be able to work with my email history overall. Right now, it’s useless. For example, I asked Gemini, “What is the date of the very first email message I ever sent?” Its response? December 23, 2025.
As if. I’ve had a Gmail account since 2005 or so. What’s strange is it couldn’t even infer dates based on the email thread we’ve been discussing. That thread began on November 10, well before the date it seems to think was the date of my first-ever email message.
You can turn Gmail AI off, but it will nerf other key features
You can turn off Gmail’s “smart features” in settings.
I tried that, but found the price too high. It also turned off all my inbox categories, which I rely on to have any control over my inbox flow.
Unfortunately, this means I have to leave the AI features on in my Gmail, whether I want them or not.
That said, I don’t have to enable Gemini overall to have access to my email. In fact, I tried. As I discussed in my article about Gemini’s scheduled actions features, I tried to get Gemini to send me news overview emails. But even though I connected my Gmail to Gemini, the AI told me it didn’t have the capability to send email.
Also: How to turn off Gemini in your Gmail, Photos, Chrome, and more – it’s easy to opt out of AI
So, here at least, I’m able to turn off Gemini’s access to my email. You do this in the settings section of Gemini’s interface at gemini.google.com.
AI should be the future of email
If you think about how AI works, how it’s trained on enormous collections of unformatted data, it would seem like email is an almost perfect data source. A Gmail AI should be able to train on all my email. All of it, going back to 2005 or so, should be fodder for Gmail’s AI knowledge base.
Think about it this way. ChatGPT and Gemini have been trained by hoovering up content from all over the web, including articles and even books I wrote. We know these companies have been using that content and all our work product to help them create these powerful AIs that are also boosting the value of their companies without compensation to the content creators.
Also: This one Gmail trick gave me another 15GB of space for free (and saved my inbox)
That same content ingesting capability could be leveraged to learn our email. Of course, the content would have to be kept as private as current Gmail archives already are. But with that understanding, and with the ability to train agents, we should be able to turn our raw email inboxes into email processing powerhouses.
Also: How to get rid of AI Overviews in Google Search: 4 easy ways
Unfortunately, we’re very much not there yet, despite Google’s recent updates to Gmail and AI. As such, while I can’t completely keep AI out of my email, I won’t be using it very much. But if it ever becomes useful to me, you know I’ll jump right onboard.
What about you? Have you tried Gemini’s AI features in Gmail? If so, have they actually helped you manage your inbox? Do AI-generated Overviews make it easier to follow long threads, or do you still prefer reading the messages yourself? How comfortable are you with giving an AI deeper access to your email history? What would it need to do before you’d trust it with more control?
Let us know in the comments below.
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