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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flat content to interactive apps -- yet email has largely stayed the same with static messages that eventually go out of date or are merely a springboard to accomplishing a more complex task," Gmail product manager Aakash Sahney writes.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flat content to interactive apps -- yet email has largely stayed the same with static messages that eventually go out of date or are merely a springboard to accomplishing a more complex task," Gmail product manager Aakash Sahney writes.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 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.
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
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.