Absoutely agree,

Gmail started scraping all emails a decade ago. Amazon responded by removing all product and pricedetails from Order confirmation and Order shipping emails. We consumers lost out -- we dont have our own copy and archive of what we ordered. If Amazon links perish to link rot and we lose access to Amazon login, our past order and spend information is gone.

FWIW, as far as I'm aware, it wasn't gmail scraping that was the cause of Amazon pulling that information. It was third-party plugins that read people's inboxes to provide them with coupons, discounts, etc., and those companies would sometimes sell the pricing data. I assume Amazon wasn't thrilled about that, but there wasn't anything they (or gmail) could do about it as long as the user was granting them access to their inbox.

But also - I just ordered something off of amazon and I noticed that the confirmation had the item that I ordered in it, albeit in a shortened/summarized way? So maybe they brought it back, figuring that with just part of the name, there's not much someone can do with the pricing information? Or maybe they just don't care anymore?

(disclosure: I work at google, but not on this, but worked adjacent to the gmail team for a few years and am going off of my memory. I'll also tap the sign that Google doesn't mine your gmail for ads, for both consumer AND paying customers).

When reconciling my budget (with YNAB) I often use gmail as my way to connect items to transactions [0]. I've found that I can just search for the amount that my card was charged in my email and find the Amazon email that relates to that order. Then, normally from the body, there is just barely enough information for me to know what I bought.

That got annoying enough that I just wrote a chrome extension to scrape Amazon orders/transactions and auto-match and update my YNAB memo line with a summary of the items.

That's a bit of a tangent just to say: yes, they nerfed their emails but not completely.

[0] Yes, YNAB recommends that you enter transactions right as you make them, but that's not how I use it.

Gmail has always scraped emails. That was in the TOS from day one. Your data was the price for the free service.