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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flat content to interactive apps -- yet email has largely stayed the same with static messages that eventually go out of date or are merely a springboard to accomplishing a more complex task," Gmail product manager Aakash Sahney writes.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flat content to interactive apps -- yet email has largely stayed the same with static messages that eventually go out of date or are merely a springboard to accomplishing a more complex task," Gmail product manager Aakash Sahney writes.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.
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.
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
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.
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
Even for major web apps that send email notifications this is a bad idea. For the AMP interactivity to work you probably need to be assumed to be logged in by virtue of being logged into email. Now you don't need to reset passwords to attack accounts from already having an email password.
Or worse, this uses third party cookies already in your browser. So now instead of a tracking pixel you have Facebook and everyone else tracing your email reads.
They want to MITM the whole web. This will be around for a long time.
Why can't this be a Google project that dies?
Projects that give Google monetizable control will never - ever - die off
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.
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.
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...
"fancy" spam!
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.
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.
"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...
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.
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!!!"