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Google Makes Emails More Dynamic With AMP For Email (techcrunch.com)
Google today officially launched AMP for Email, its effort to turn emails from static documents into dynamic, web page-like experiences. From a report: AMP for Email is coming to Gmail, but other major email providers like Yahoo Mail, Outlook and Mail.ru will also support AMP emails. It's been more than a year since Google first announced this initiative. Even by Google standards, that's a long incubation phase, though there's also plenty of backend work necessary to make this feature work.
The promise of AMP for Email is that it'll turn basic messages into a surface for actually getting things done. "Over the past decade, our web experiences have changed enormously -- evolving from static flat content to interactive apps -- yet email has largely stayed the same with static messages that eventually go out of date or are merely a springboard to accomplishing a more complex task," Gmail product manager Aakash Sahney writes. "If you want to take action, you usually have to click on a link, open a new tab, and visit another website." With AMP for Email, those messages become interactive. That means you'll be able to RSVP to an event right from the message, fill out a questionnaire, browse through a store's inventory or respond to a comment -- all without leaving your web-based email client.
The promise of AMP for Email is that it'll turn basic messages into a surface for actually getting things done. "Over the past decade, our web experiences have changed enormously -- evolving from static flat content to interactive apps -- yet email has largely stayed the same with static messages that eventually go out of date or are merely a springboard to accomplishing a more complex task," Gmail product manager Aakash Sahney writes. "If you want to take action, you usually have to click on a link, open a new tab, and visit another website." With AMP for Email, those messages become interactive. That means you'll be able to RSVP to an event right from the message, fill out a questionnaire, browse through a store's inventory or respond to a comment -- all without leaving your web-based email client.
I remember the old fantasy that the Web would be the next operating system. Nobody really thought all that much about who would end up in control of that operating system.
so many ways this is not a good idea.
I am tired of "experiences". What is wrong with a simple, fast, low-latency interface for mail? Good examples of this are Thunderbird, Roundcube, or even Mutt. Mail doesn't need to be "edgy". It needs to be quick, and support the usual features, so I can read whatever is there, reply, have rules to send the latest message from $VENDOR to a specific E-mail box, and support PGP and S/MIME.
Didn't we learn from the early 2000s with all the E-mail worms about "experiences" and "live content" in E-mails? Looks like Google forgot.
This wouldn't be need if people didn't cram every fucking thing in there main pages.
This is a Google branded solution to a problem they helped cause. They rather have another revenue stream than fix the issue.
http://progressquest.com/spoltog.php?name=Son+Of+Son+Of+DarkRookie
Sorry, once a message arrives in my INBOX, I do NOT want it to change. I want it STATIC!
Why do some people want to fix things that aren't broken?
If you want a messaging platform with non-static messages, DO NOT CALL IT E-MAIL!
The promise of AMP for Email is that it'll turn basic messages into a surface for actually getting things done.
Things like increasing the attack surface of your e-mail client.
I don't use a web based email, and there are reasons for it, so you can keep your interactive emails.
Phishing will be more efficient and effective than ever!
AMP - the feature nobody asked for.
P.S. => With millions of hijacked computers on the darkweb even HOSTS file can't protect you from targeted phishing attacks.
This will become security vector in relatively short order.
We don't want interactive email, we don't trust this to not be a gaping security hole.
This is a terrible idea.
Another way to pervert a perfectly functional utility.
Remember when companies jumped all over the html bandwagon for email? Outlook was especially awful at rendering, iirc, but generally the corporate design got in the way of the actual purpose, which was transmitting information.
Thankfully, people realized this, and probably 90% of the email I see now is just text. Maybe with a logo or something,but that's all.
Amp for email? That's just the html idiocy all over again, only now cached on Google's server for their data collection. No, thanks, please get lost.
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
The "Hey Google invented something new!" era has passed. This is not needed nor useful.
Not me.
I've lost count of the Google products I embraced only to have them discontinued.
Why can't this be a Google project that dies?
I can't read your message. Please re-send as plain text.
I already get email messages that are HTML format with almost nothing but remote-loading images. Since I don't permit remote loaded content, those messages are unreadable. AMP sounds like a way to make this problem even more common.
For those of us who don't want this feature, remember Google's life expectancy for their products.
https://www.fastcompany.com/90...
Congratulations for inventing a new type of email anti-pattern!
http://www.email-anti-patterns.com
Is that you Hillary?
And by the way, how will this affect one's ability to rely on emails as reliable historical, (and perhaps legal), documentation? Will this new bit of shiny render 'going back through old emails' obsolete?
Then there's the prospect of full-on advertising in the body of an email. And will compatibility with regular email clients be maintained? I suspect not - Google and other players want us to do EVERYTHING via the browser, the better to control our 'experience'.
And WTF is (FTA) "a surface for actually getting things done"? AFAIC that's my desk. This new scheme is a 'surface' alright - it smells like an attack surface to me.
'The Economy' is a giant Ponzi scheme whose most pitiable suckers are the youngest among us and the yet-unborn.
Google manager 1: we need to do something about email, it's protocols are full of holes, like send mails without sander address or with a fake sender address, like your own. And mails are full of shit javascript that bring a lot of shit onto our clients systems!
Google manager 2: but that would require to stop third party scammers using our services!
Google manager 1: you al right, let's add a shit framework to add more javascript crap!
If it can't be turned off then someone needs to write code that can easily be added to gmail to do so. Google could add such an option but it would likely be buried as a obscure option in the settings.
In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act. George Orwell
What could possibly go wrong?
"I believe in Karma. That means I can do bad things to people all day long and I assume they deserve it." : Dogbert
just what we need, more features to support advertisers.
What's the use case for AMP in the context of a person sending another person an email?
I think Microsoft learned this lesson ages ago, it's not a bad idea by itself but people abuse the hell out of email. Hopefully times have changed a bit.
Give me PINE instead.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
I only accept plain text email. Anything else is discarded. I guess email will finally die and I can't wait.
This seems to be in the nature of promotional material for Google than news.
Just put a link to whatever you want.
Or else it's just embed the browser inside the email client, or it's redefine html and I doubt you'll get away from Javascript.
This seems like a hope, but it's really just an html tag.
I don't use a web browser to read email. I use an email client.
I am tired of "experiences". What is wrong with a simple, fast, low-latency interface for mail?
I agree 100000%
As anyone will say who has ever attempted to use Facebook (just try finding your old comment to follow up on in a big FB thread. Good luck with that.) or these crap online "discussion" forums to communicate, and still remembers the (mostly) text-only USENET discussion fora that united the world by subject, rather than splintering it by website or service, textual interfaces are so often vastly superior to the eye candy, malware vectore, inbuilt surveillance, shitty search, shitty thread management, etc. morass that is today's "Web 2". Even slashdot pales compared to USENET, as we're reduced to a tiny subset of people with our common interests to talk to, rather than everyone with said interest from school kids to NASA rocket scientists (or whoever). Reddit isn't any better, nor are any of the other fora now that USENET is gone.
And now they're doing the same thing to email.
I already find my internet usage declining, not because I lack time, but because I lack interest in the ever-more-present drivel of noise, and ever less present gems of signal (and even those are now so often cluttered with frames, and javascript buttons, and ads , or blank boxes where ads would be were it not for my favorite ad blockers, etc. etc.). The devolution of email into yet another media rich cesspool of advertising, malware, and just plain noise will further reduce many people's interest in this medium. I wonder how long until the Internet goes the way of broadcast television, replaced by something else as-yet unpolluted by corporate greedmeisters.
Whatever. So what we want is a gmail account without a password so anyone can post any comment on anything, plus a password that the OP can use to edit and remove (you know, moderate) any useless content. So a free website-blog sort of thing. Get on it.
Proton Mail is sounding better all the time.
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
.... everyone says "great!"
Oh wow. No one said great.
I don't think I've ever seen such solidarity in a /. thread. Everyone thinks this is a bad idea. It must truly be as bad as it sounds...
Fuck off Google!
Each "new" rev of gmail further diminishes any quality the service may have once had.
When I help family members with their gmail problems, I cannot believe how slow and clunky it has become; even on my 89 year old Grandmother's Macbook pro, with 8GB of memory. Try explaining to her why the gmail inteface changes so often, and has become so bad. "Where are my folders?" she asks, like millions of other users.
A google popup mandating that she accept some new interface? It causes immediate fear and paralysis that she has been pwned and will lose her saved recipes and carefully curated propaganda.
My infrequent use of gmail is via static html. Never javascript. It is a good place to dump mailing lists and junk mail sources. Google can go amp themselves.
Google is pissed that there are still people who don't use Gmail, so to ensure that nobody remains free from spying, here's a shiny "open" standard for everyone to adopt. Which coincidentally hosts all content on Google, but pay no mind to these silly details!
Frankly I don't give a damn... I mean, if I need to send a text message I just send a text message, that'is what email is for. Well, I can attach files, pictures... but email is for text, otherwise don't call it email
Time for Anti-Trust Laws
"fancy" spam!
I have never and will never send out any form of advertising or spam. However, people with gmail accounts often do not receive my email responses. I think my responses are probably going into gmail folders other than the inbox and are difficult to find. Some people that I'm in contact with are older and they become confused and frustrated relatively easily so they won't hunt through their other gmail folders. Maybe if I had a gmail account they would receive my emails. Dirty tactics?
I think MS had introduced ActiveX for similar purposes (to make webpages more dynamic & interactive) but it quickly led to extreme levels of all possible kinds of exploitation on the internet!!!
Can Google absolutely guarantee security of this tech & impossibility of using it for any kind of abuse???
Er, no thanks Google. AMP is there to get people to connect to your servers, not for dynamic content.
And, to be quite frank, I don't want my emails being dynamic. They're static, immutable, and evidence in case something goes wrong. Allowing them to (potentially) dissapear up their own arse because the supporting server fucked off, or someone decided I don't need access anymore is a VERY BAD IDEA INDEED.
Go away.
its effort to turn emails from static documents into dynamic, web page-like experiences.
Webpages, especially 'dynamic' webpages, are crap these days. Stuff constantly loading, moving, jumping around, not working correctly, etc. Please leave email alone...
Static emails don't go out of date, they contain exactly what they contained when I was sent them, which is what they are supposed to do. It's server driven dynamic emails that would go dead, or replace what they told me then with whatever they want to tell me now. No thanks.
You know, I was speaking to my colleagues just the other day, "I wish I could do more with my emails." I've always found macros in Word documents such a liberating tool in my life and now, Google has empowered me with AMP! Now I can combine my insipid, pointless emails will all kinds of useless, dynamic crap as well.
I am not a robot. I am a unicorn.
microsoft has had that for years with outlook forms and infopath
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
Back in the day. When people laughed at people that thought they could be infected by emails.
Then put in a ESC sequence that, when the email was read, programmed their function keys to bounce back a message.
5 bit telex seems OK though.
All the kool kids are using siloed messengers like facebook, instagram, imessage, signal, .....
When the likes of you and I drop off our perches nobody will remember what email was.
AMP will accelerate this process. By embedding siloed message servers into the "surface" of the emails.
And me, wishing all emails were plain text. Can anyone do that for us all? (please)
The year 2096. Email, which has long been waiting an overhaul, has become simple again with Gagglezon's "Simply Mail" which uses plain text to communicate without all the waste.
Email is the last massively used independent federated communication technology. Unfortunately, irresponsible users allowed Google to monopolize it by flocking to gmail, and now Google is starting to take advantage of their position. Remember what happened to XMPP?
This is precisely the opposite: a complex solution with to no problem at all.
- In Soviet Korea, only old people loose all their bases to Natalie Portman's petrified hot grits overlords.
You know, on a OS that runs inside a VM that is implemented in your browser. :D
Like JSLinux, or HTML5... By the way: When does VirtualBox fuse with Chrome to allow other platforms than HTML5 in the browser?
Fuck am I happy that I'm not forced to use ANY of that crap.
If it doesn't have its own TCP/UDP port, or even protocol, it can fuck right off!
Is there a header or HTML tag I can use to filter this spam?
"The promise of AMP for Email is that it'll turn basic messages into a surface for actually getting things done."
Yet another 'improvement' that nobody fuckin' wants or needs. This is just more dumbass hipster-driven bullshit that will be quietly forgotten about in a year... and then Google will drop it, just like they drop everything else that doesn't make them oodles of money.
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
https://amp.dev/documentation/...
This has nothing to do with improving email. I't just turning email into a heavily scripted webpage. In other words, it's a kind of backdoor push, allowing companies that send email to send active and interactive webpages to your inbox. It's a way to get past the pesky privacy of people who use an actual email program rather than webmail. And no doubt it will involve ads once it's established. None of this is relevant to personal communications.
We need mail servers sending rejection responses to individuals sending you AMP or HTML emails, with a request to resend them as plaintext.
Sadly I don't think there is a provision to do this from within standards compliant mail clients at the moment, but even if it required an added step to connect to a web frontend on your ISP/mail provider's site to enable this, it would be a huge benefit, provide an automated rejection response back to people for you, and only require a few extra rules and an option in the already comprehensive anti-spam filtering mechanisms.
Let's collectively just say NO! to google's control of the web and email. It's already to the point where I can't spin up my own email server and expect to either recieve or send mail, and it has become spotty to know which email services will work with which others. Email is effectively a ghetto and a series of walled gardens now.
Sounds like another technology to share the graveyard with Google+, Wave....
My bet is for 2021 any other takers?
Emails can be secure because they don't do anything. The only thing that executes in response to an e-mail should be the receiver (human or application). The e-mail itself as dead as possible specifically to avoid remote exploits and whatnot. Otherwise just opening an e-mail becomes a severe problem.
This is not a feature that I want!
Thanks, TFA. Those four words tell the rest of us everything we need to know.
Do Not Want.
It does offer a giant attack vector though.
And break the simple perfection of email.
Seriously, what's wrong with email? Nothing, that's what. Easy to implement, easy to use, and it's fast and lightweight, not bloated with unnecessary bandwidth-hogging "features".
...a desktop email client (Thunderbird) and set everything to plain text; incoming & outgoing. No images, only plain text links so that I can see where they're going & what information they're carrying in the query string. I just want to read & write messages. Email's great for that. Don't spoil it.
Debate is a form of harassment. Do not question my truth.
We need a form of business communication that is simple and static.
I'm guessing this is going to be adopted by so many businesses and will take off very quickly. I have always been a little skeptical about AMP for the web but this is basically every marketer's dream. By enabling customers to take action immediately within an email, it eliminates the typical call to action messages that are often so desperate in hoping customers will be willing to jump through additional hoops in their marketing funnels. This will literally expand the horizon and completely change the future of email marketing.
See subject. I want my email to be flat, boring, and uninteresting. I guess, in a way, I am excited about all the new scams and viral outbreaks that this will precipitate, but for the most part, I think this is an absolutely terrible thing.
Prove me wrong. (You might be able to prove me wrong in theory, but come back in two years and let's see if your proof still stands. ROFLMAO)
"Someone needs to talk to the tree of liberty about its ghoulish drinking problem." by ohnocitizen
I'm so old that it was a joke on newbies that you could catch a virus by just reading an email.
Then Bill the Gates made that real, with HTML email. Now Google wants to add scripting into the email.
Great idea, goog... you have taken down all the "first, don't do evil" posters and shredded them, right?
And the people who want this? "I've got nothing at all to say, but let me give you me, singing and dancing!!!"