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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flat content to interactive apps -- yet email has largely stayed the same with static messages that eventually go out of date or are merely a springboard to accomplishing a more complex task," Gmail product manager Aakash Sahney writes.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flat content to interactive apps -- yet email has largely stayed the same with static messages that eventually go out of date or are merely a springboard to accomplishing a more complex task," Gmail product manager Aakash Sahney writes.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.
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.
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...
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
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.
"Nobody really thought about it" really means you didn't think about it.
Lots of people thought about it. During the Browser Wars of Netscape v Microsoft starting in late 1995, control over who owns the future was discussed all the time. Companies spent untold billion dollars fighting for that control. Microsoft spent several billion dollars trying to embed their browser into the operating systems. The Netscape/AOL deal was $4.2 billion with companies desperate to be in control. Various players have entered and exited the field, but the war is still going strong.
Across all the companies, there have been several trillion dollars spent over the decades fighting for that control, and many companies were (and are) fighting to the death.
//TODO: Think of witty sig statement
They want to MITM the whole web. This will be around for a long time.
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 only accept plain text email. Anything else is discarded. I guess email will finally die and I can't wait.
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.
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...
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.