how to turn off smart features on gmail

You can turn off Gmail’s smart features from the Settings menu in a couple of clicks, and you may also want to disable related “Workspace” smart features so your email isn’t used for AI-style personalization.

What “smart features” do

Gmail’s smart features include things like Smart Compose, Smart Reply, automatic email categorization (Primary / Social / Promotions), nudges, and other AI‑style suggestions based on your email content.

These rely on scanning your emails and attachments to generate predictions and recommendations, which some users now want to turn off because of privacy and AI‑training concerns.

Turn off smart features (Gmail, Chat & Meet)

On desktop Gmail (recommended so you see all options):

1. Open Gmail and sign in.

2. Click the gear icon in the top‑right corner.

3. Click “See all settings” to open the full settings page.

4. In the General tab, scroll down until you find the section labelled something like Smart features and personalization or Smart features in Gmail, Chat and Meet.

5. Uncheck the box next to “Turn on smart features in Gmail, Chat and Meet.”

6. Scroll to the bottom and click Save changes if the button appears.

After this, features such as Smart Compose suggestions, Smart Reply buttons, and some automatic sorting or enrichment (e.g., package tracking cards) may stop working.

Turn off Google Workspace smart features

Even after turning off the main smart features, there is a second place where Gmail can still feed data into other Google products, so it is worth disabling that too for maximum privacy.

1. Still in Gmail Settings → See all settings → General , scroll to the section called Google Workspace smart features (or similar wording).

2. Click the link such as Manage Workspace smart feature settings.

3. Turn off both toggles:
   • Smart features in Google Workspace.
   • Smart features in other Google products.

4. Confirm and save if prompted.

This helps prevent features in products like Calendar, Maps, and other Google tools from drawing on your Gmail content for “smart” enhancements.

Extra: Fine‑tune individual smart tools

If you do not want to disable everything, you can selectively turn off only certain smart tools.

Examples on the General tab of Gmail settings:

• Smart Compose
  • Turn off writing suggestions while you type.
  • Turn off “personalization” so suggestions no longer adapt to your writing style.
• Smart Reply
  • Disable suggested quick replies that appear under received emails.
• Nudges / follow‑up reminders
  • Turn off reminders to reply to or follow up on older emails.

This approach keeps Gmail usable while reducing how much AI‑style automation touches your messages.

Information gathered from public forums or data available on the internet and portrayed here.