29 ms·

AMP for email is a terrible idea

• tlrobinson 9y ago
  > “For example, imagine you could complete tasks directly in email.” Pretty much the only task I ever want to complete from inside an email is “Unsubscribe”. I wish clients would make it easier. Gmail does has an unsubscribe button for some emails. It would be cool if it recognized emails I consistently ignore and prompt me to unsubscribe from them.
  • DogOfTheGaps 9y ago
    The Inbox App for Android does this.
• paulie_a 9y ago
  Amp is a terrible idea.
• mankash666 9y ago
  Just a Luddite rant on love of a pedestrian standard. Without even trying out Google's offering, the author goes off on a preconceived notion. I welcome Google's attempt at this - let the free market decide it's success
  • tibbetts 9y ago
    Free market? Is that what we call it when one member of the duopoly controlling most email clients decides to embrace and extend the standard? Also even if you believe in Santa Claus and free markets, people getting on their soapbox to say “this is a terrible idea” is part of the free market.
    • mankash666 9y ago
      No - expressing an opinion is called "freedom of speech", which goes hand in hand with the free market. You'd be amazed at the number of initiatives launched by the supposed monopoly (Google) failing in the free market. Nacl lost out to wasm. Chrome OS never really took off. Despite people's gripes about AMP, consumers are clearly loving faster, more responsive websites and hence it's relevance. Let this play out and we'll see where it leads
      • ZephyrP 9y ago
        > No - expressing an opinion is called "freedom of speech" imagine thinking this was a killer counterpoint
        • mankash666 9y ago
          I don't know what a "killer" counter point is, but I do know that it's accurate
      • SquareWheel 9y ago
        Isn't ChromeOS very popular in schools? I would assume so based on the sales of Chromebooks anyway. Re: Amp, this topic always leads to people foaming at the mouth on HN. I don't expect to see much actual discussion occur.
      • taeric 9y ago
        Strictly, freedom of speech is a political term, not a market one.
    • alooPotato 9y ago
      just a hypothetical, but if you were to assume that Google had no ill will here and was actually trying to make stuff better for users - what do you think the best way would be for people working at Google to do this? I.e. say you worked on the gmail team, you really cared about users, you thought amp for email would be good for users, how would you go about making this happen in the world? genuinely curious if its even possible for Google try and improve things without having some of the downsides you mentioned.
      • IntronExon 9y ago
        just a hypothetical, but if you were to assume that Google had no ill will here and was actually trying to make stuff better for users Hypothetically, you’d be making an assumption at odds with years of anti-consumer behavior.
      • pwinnski 9y ago
        If I cared about users primarily, I would hope I wouldn't jump ahead to "amp for email is good." Your requisites for this thought exercise are too broad. If Google wants to improve email, I would start by emphatically recognizing why their previous attempt to supplant it with Wave failed, and stop trying to break email's openness,
        • alooPotato 9y ago
          That was part of my hypothetical, that you actually believe amp for email is good.
      • ocdtrekkie 9y ago
        This is a pretty packed question, there's a lot of factors. The size of Google, and the fact that they own several complimentary monopolies makes it very hard for them to do anything without providing a new conflict of interest. Take Chrome's ad blocking... there's no way this can be ethically done by Google, even if blocking annoying ads definitively improves user experience. If Chrome was not owned by Google, it wouldn't be at issue, but it is owned by Google, and there's no way for Google to approach this topic. Googlers who care about this should push Google to split off Chrome into an independent foundation. AMP is a way to push content to centralized platforms. Even if others run AMP caches (which are pointless because Google Search uses Google's cache, etc.), it pulls the Internet towards centralized cloud providers of which Google is one of the top three. And again we cross a huge self-interest issue. If Google wanted to retain enough goodwill to even start to walk this back, they need to move back to open protocols. RSS (or a newer JSON equivalent), XMPP (or a newer equivalent), etc. And deal with all the mess that comes with true decentralized open standards. It's not like Google can't afford the additional difficulties. If their AI is as great as they claim (it's not, G+ porn spam is rampant), it shouldn't be hard for them to provide good experiences on open federated systems. Want to run apps in emails? Great. Does the user want it? Can I decide which apps I want running inside my emails, based on what's useful for me? Will the user get to pick whether their AMP emails are dynamic or not? Google+ notifications have a long history in Gmail of overwriting the display of the actual email with a live page, which can try to obscure the email's original content, like in the case of a deleted message. You'd have to use an IMAP client to see the content of the message that was actually sent to you.
  • tomc1985 9y ago
    Free market as influenced by a commercial entity intentionally making most other options unusable. Yeah, the free market is a good metric there...
    • vkou 9y ago
      It can be argued that e-mail spam made most self-hosted e-mail unusable.
      • khm 9y ago
        That argument is not compelling, given the number of people and organizations that self-host email.
        • vkou 9y ago
          The problem is not that it's difficult to run an SMTP server - botnets run millions of them. The problem is that telling a legitimate one from one that sends spam is an arms race.
• guessmyname 9y ago
  Devin Coldewey against a bunch of Google employees, who will win? (sarcasm) On a more serious note, if the idea of AMP is so bad as many people attest. How is that the "bad idea" passed over so many people at a company that praises itself of hiring some of the most smartest people in the field? Hyperbole, the author of this article is just generalizing. Maybe AMP for email works for some people, making it a good idea for them.
  • pwinnski 9y ago
    Please consider what you're suggesting. Do you mean to say that Google cannot possibly do anything that isn't good? Really? AMP is good for Google, and secondarily maybe also good for some subset of people who care more about short-term benefits on slow connections than the long-term damage to the open web. AMP for email is good for Google alone.
    • guessmyname 9y ago
      > Do you mean to say that Google cannot possibly do anything that isn't good? Really? No, that's not what I am saying, please don't put words in my mouth. My comment is divided in three parts: 1) sarcasm 2) question and 3) counter argument. The sarcasm is already labelled. The question is what you assumed was an affirmation. The counter argument is, "AMP works for some people", you said "AMP for email is good for Google alone" which proves that my counter argument is true. AMP, bad or not, works for some people (in your comment, Google employees), which is what I originally wrote in my parent comment. I don't see what do I need to reconsider from this. There is also comments in this thread from people who say they like AMP, probing my statement even more: "it works for some people".
      • pwinnski 9y ago
        > How is that the "bad idea" passed over so many people at a company that praises itself of hiring some of the most smartest people in the field? That formulation is disingenuous at best, and your follow-up describing it as a "question" is just as bad. How is it that you think your comment was acceptable when so many people disagree at a website that praises itself for having some of the smartest commenters on the web? I hope that helps demonstrate the dishonesty of a question of that format. No need to answer.
• marcell 9y ago
  Good luck! I had the "pleasure" of working on HTML emails a few months back. It was unbelievably painful. Getting even a simple email to display consistently across a dozen different mail clients is a huge pain. This is why so many marketing emails use giant images for everything--it's the simples way to get consistent rendering. I predict whatever Google launches will work in GMail, and GMail only.
  • taeric 9y ago
    I further predict it will work in GMail and Inbox differently from each other. Which is just mind boggling. Why!?
    • JoshMnem 9y ago
      Embrace, Extend, Extinguish -- then walled garden.
  • chrismorgan 9y ago
    Most of the pain of HTML email is Microsoft’s fault, because they have persisted in using the MSO (Word) HTML render/editor in Outlook and Windows Mail, and it’s worse than IE 5.0. (Outlook 2003 switched to the IE renderer, and everyone rejoiced; then the Outlook 2007 went back to the MSO renderer for rather crummy reasons and all web people boggled and despaired.) Sure, other clients have their inconsistencies, but they’re nowhere near as bad as MSO, and they actually get fixed over time. Microsoft, on the other hand, persist in using a rather buggy engine from twenty years ago, unchanged (I don’t know that there haven’t been any functional changes or bug fixes since then, but if there have been they’re minor or obscure).
    • ShroudedNight 9y ago
      I'm fairly certain that Lotus Notes is deserving of at least as much scorn for its mail rendering as Outlook.
      • kbenson 9y ago
• taeric 9y ago
  I'm just now finding out that google is planning AMP for email. :( It seems almost comical. On the one hand, we are constantly told that email is losing out to modern instant messaging avenues for communication. On this hand, the plan for competing is to try and make it more heavy weight? Reminds me of when Wave supposedly was going to remake email. I suspect someday I'll just be a luddite, as mentioned in another thread. I really hope this is not that day.
• FridgeSeal 9y ago
  " “modernize” email, allowing “engaging, interactive, and actionable email experiences.” " Whenever a service or company purports to make something "engaging" and "interactive" you just know that useability and actual, tangible usefulness are going to go out the window in favour of marketer-driven choices. We don't 'engage more' with your software/service because you changed everything to optimise for engagement and time spent, we engaged more because it took more time/steps to get the same thing done. Arguably what we should be doing is optimising for less time spent on an app/service for the purposes of enabling a better/more efficient/more enjoyable experience by letting users get what they want to do done quickly and easily.
  • colordrops 9y ago
    You are making a mistake in thinking you are the customer. You are the product.
    • FridgeSeal 9y ago
      Right, but I think it's fatalistic to just write off any attempt to come up with better solutions: nothing will change if we don't at least start thinking about, proposing and testing other ideas. I think it's a reasonable assumption that most people here are devs or interested in software/programming/etc. Marketers aren't going to be the ones who are actually interested in making better products, they're practically premature-optimisation-in-user-hostile-directions personified, so someone else has to at least propose these ideas.
    • chx 9y ago
      When using gsuite, I am the customer.
      • vanadium 9y ago
        Then hopefully I can turn it off in my GSuite administration account... ...doubt it.
      • cdolan 9y ago
• dingo_bat 9y ago
  > AMP ~~for email~~ is a terrible idea FTFY. I cannot wait for this cancer to die off. For now, I avoid anything by Google as much I can.
• tyingq 9y ago
  Ugh. Hopefully unlike the serp results, nobody feels like they have to cave in here due to the carrot/stick Google wields in search. If they do wield a similar influence because of the market share of Gmail, hopefully somebody challenges that under antitrust or some other consumer protection basis. Email doesn't need walled gardens. That's back to the AOL days. "You've got AMP mail!"
• bastawhiz 9y ago
  I don't know the technical details of what Google is planning, but if they build something that eases the pain of building cross platform HTML emails, that's a welcome innovation in my opinion. Building emails that "work" even just okay is a ridiculously hard task. Every company I've been at has made some attempt with mediocre results at best (oh, you're using _Outlook_?). I'm not holding my breath for something good to come out of this, though. This could just as easily be a terribly executed product. But I'll try to be an optimist, because what we have now is outright trash.
  • gerdesj 9y ago
    "but if they build something that eases the pain of building cross platform HTML emails" On the other hand, if HTML is excluded then the message gets through without scope for mischief.
    • bastawhiz 9y ago
      HTML emails are here to stay, and the billions of dollars that companies pour into designing, building, and sending them are proof of that. Given the constraint that we're stuck writing and consuming them, I'd rather have a technology that does a good job than a technology that makes me want to boil my laptop. If you're afraid of HTML, by all means please check your email from a sandboxed VM in the terminal. But some poor chump is still going to be toiling away to make the latest Pottery Barn newsletter look great on a Blackberry, so we'd might as well build better tools.
  • zeroimpl 9y ago
    Seriously. Would be great if somebody could just declare a new mime-type such as "text/html5" that could be used to activate modern html rendering in email clients and would be shipped alongside the existing "text/html" and "text/plain" components. Eventually when enough email clients support this, we could stop generating the legacy html emails and only include text/html5 and text/plain mime types in emails.
    • bastawhiz 9y ago
• celim307 9y ago
  As heresey as it might be to HN I can't wait until everyone in the world onboards onto one unified communication platform. Once (and if) lte and unlimited data becomes ubiquitous I look forward to be able to make phone calls, email, messages, video messaging, blogging etc all from one username and account. I want to hand someone my username and be done with it. Facebook is trying, but it's execution leaves much to be desired
  • craftyguy 9y ago
    I don't think this will ever happen. There are just far too many people, with far too many requirements. For example, I would never use a centralized, proprietary platform for these services. Some folks don't care, but they may want it to work on <insert latest device fad here>. Even if it works on that device, it will likely need to comply with local regulations around the world, each with their own requirements. If we (humans) can't even get a single, agree on unified service for something 'simple' like web search, what makes you think we'll ever converge on dozens of mediums/services/protocols?
  • deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  • falcolas 9y ago
    So long as said account has not been banned for tripping some unknown algorithm, and have received the "this is the last communication on this matter" message. At which point in such a world where there is one, and only one, communication platform, do you even exist?
  • quickthrower2 9y ago
    Email has this feature. Hand me your email address. I send you an email. For phone calls you have telephones, again hand me your phone number and I will call you. Video is annoying, it would be nice to bypass Skype/Google Hangouts etc.
• CapacitorSet 9y ago
  Related reading: Against an increasingly user-hostile Web, https://www.neustadt.fr/essays/against-a-user-hostile-web/ https://www.neustadt.fr/essays/against-a-user-hostile-web/ >It all comes down a simple but very dangerous shift: the major websites of today's web are not built for the visitor, but as means of using her. Our visitor has become a data point, a customer profile, a potential lead -- a proverbial fly in the spider's web. In the guise of user-centered design, we're building an increasingly user-hostile web.
  • dmix 9y ago
    In this case page load times are being valued over everything (not just AMP but also the search rankings algorithm). I'm not 100% sure if it's a vanity metric for Google or not. ...Google does have some of the greatest statistical minds in the world, just maybe not the best product/UX minds. KPI's can be highly misleading when it's disconnected from raw UX. It's difficult to measure user emotional experience, especially when you have a monopoly on user attention with Google Search and total product lock-in with Gmail. When users don't have alternative options analytics stats can be deceiving. And just because a user completes X task a hundred milliseconds faster it doesn't necessarily mean the UX was better. And just because the UX was made incrementally worse doesn't mean I'm going to use Google/Gmail any less. But enough of small cuts can build up into a serious wound.
  • AndrewKemendo 9y ago
    I remember reading that article and thinking that the author either isn't old enough to remember the 90s web or has memory loss about how hostile it was to the user. Ubiquitous banner ads, "free" 56k if you use our browser and click links, cookie bonanza, link hijacking etc... have been part of the web since day one.
    • CaptSpify 9y ago
      > Ubiquitous banner ads, "free" 56k if you use our browser and click links, cookie bonanza, link hijacking etc... have been part of the web since day one. No they haven't. I definitely remember the web before those were common, and it was great. And while yes, the web was hostile back then, we also thought about it as hostile. There's been a definite shift in how the web is presented. Back then, we taught "Don't put anything personal online, it's all shady." But now, we want users to give us everything they can, and we've changed the language to allow it. "It's OK for you to give this data to us. We're Google/Facebook/Twitter/etc. There's no way we'd be irresponsible with that data" It's not like we've come up with some new, super-secure way to store that data. The web is even more shady nowadays, but we're training users not to think about it that way.
• tejasmanohar 9y ago
  AMP is, to begin with, Google exerting its market power to extend its control over others’ content. Facebook is doing it, so Google has to. As a consumer, I actually love AMP. Everytime I click a news link on mobile and am taken to AMP, I'm relieved to be free from the extremely distracting original websites. Google has done a lot of exciting work on open standards like JSON-LD [0] and Microdata [1] to bring a better experience to both Google search results and Gmail. I love clicking the inline "Confirm subscription" button [2] instead of opening emails from Mailchimp and searching for a link. I'm not that scared of the future becoming locked into Google. I believe they'll improve upon and create better standards for emails. Most things aren't entirely altruistic, and that's OK. Gmail being an early adopter to these standards is a good enough reason for them. [0]: https://developers.google.com/gmail/markup/reference/formats/json-ld https://developers.google.com/gmail/markup/reference/formats... [1]: https://developers.google.com/gmail/markup/reference/formats/microdata https://developers.google.com/gmail/markup/reference/formats... [2]: https://developers.google.com/gmail/markup/reference/one-click-action https://developers.google.com/gmail/markup/reference/one-cli...
  • bdhess 9y ago
    We have the exact opposite opinion then. I moved to DuckDuckGo on iOS because I thought the AMP formatted Google search results were so user-hostile. Maybe they’ve fixed the bizarre scrolling and overly sensitive links by now, but I see no reason to find out, because I don’t feel like I’m missing anything.
    • tejasmanohar 9y ago
      For what it's worth, I only use my phone seriously when I'm out and about, and a lot of times, my internet connection isn't the best, e.g. while in metro
      • Bartweiss 9y ago
        This is true for me too, but I still find that using AMP pages on Android is basically nonfunctional. They load fast, but scrolling is shoddy and every single linking function (back button, hyperlink, and new tab alike) is a mess. If I want to load a single page with dense content, view it without scrolling much, and close the tab, AMP makes my mobile experience better. If I want to do anything else, AMP on Android starts to interfere with basic functionality. Which is a pretty sad story for a Google CDN on a Google browser on a Google OS.
• gerdesj 9y ago
  Thank goodness that a bunch of clever kids are going to replace boring old SMTP n MTAs n MUAs and stuff with this bollocks: https://www.ampproject.org/ https://www.ampproject.org/ 8) email works and doesn't need fixing. It (nearly) transports more messages every day than is countable and just works. SNR - now that needs fixing and a good start would be enforcing plain text.
  • bigiain 9y ago
    It's OK though, they replaced email and SMTP with Google Wave back in '09 or so, right?
  • david-cako 9y ago
    Email “works” but it’s ass for consistently displaying anything more than text. Marketers want to make money, and right now stuffing emails with images in favor of proper layout is the only easy way to do it. Of course google also wants all of your email googling its way through their servers.
    • SllX 9y ago
      > Email “works” but it’s ass for consistently displaying anything more than text. That's a feature, not a bug.
    • shostack 9y ago
      As a marketer my fear is Google sees what FB is doing to monetize the feed format and it is moving to turn email into the next algorithmically controlled feed it can turn into a dynamic auction. There is already a Gmail placement for AdWords ok the GDN. However for the most part, if I as a marketer send emails to my customers, I can be more or less certain they will get delivered if my deliverability is high. What I see Google doing here is gradually exerting control until they tell brands "hey, you know those messages you used to send to customers for basically free? Now you need to pay a dynamic price we control in order to get any "organic" reach." And just like that they will have turned one of the most valuable, scalable and cost effective marketing channels into another large revenue stream for themselves that gives them even more leverage over marketers. Kinds of genius when you think about it.
• makecheck 9y ago
  Nothing says “we’re listening to your concerns about AMP” like rolling it out further to interfere with a function that is even less suited for AMP. Also, technology companies have a real problem assigning appropriate value to maintenance tasks that just keep things stable and usable. I’ve had infrastructure responsibilities over the years and the hardest thing about it was that nobody really knows or cares how much trouble you put into having things work flawlessly for months or years on end. It was important to find lots of visible tasks to go along with the invisible ones. I guess you end up with things like 40 Google chat clients and “hey let’s screw with E-mail” when there isn’t enough promotion-worthy work left to do in those areas.
  • mikeytown2 9y ago
    I'm waiting for AMP chat; I hear it's fast. /s
    • falcolas 9y ago
      And you can run it on any platform, so long as it's Google's. The best user choice since the color of your Model T.
      • pasbesoin 9y ago
        And it will supplant Duo and Allo, that were/are supposed to supplant (or augment, or co-exist -- can't we all just get along?) Hangouts, that was supposed to integrate SMS and MMS, but bollocks. Anyway, I prefer my email to remain immutable after initial transmission. I don't need another Snapbookthingie... Which reminds me, Google: You already hosed search results with your first... or second, or third, buzzzzzz... big social, dynamic (comments) push, Plus. And almost nobody liked Buzz, nor the way you tried to shove it down our throats. Are you really going to take another stab at sabotaging one of your successful products -- this time, Gmail? You HAD a successful social platform: Reader. And you nuked it. You want "social" and "changing content"? Bring back Reader. Buy a clue.
        • 9y ago
• SubiculumCode 9y ago
  I will put it out here and now: Gmail and me are done if Google goes ahead with the AMP-lification of email.
  • FridgeSeal 9y ago
    For sure, it'll finally provide me the impetus to move to a service like Fastmail/ProtonMail/etc.
    • toomuchtodo 9y ago
      I would contribute to a campaign to help FastMail support multiple labels on messages. It’s the only thing keeping me tied to Gmail.
      • ocdtrekkie 9y ago
        The challenge is those labels aren't standards-based. Gmail has all sorts of weird issues when you interact with it over IMAP. Even Google's own Takeout will end up making multiple copies of your messages, one per label, as it converts to folders. For a while I still had Gmail but used platforms Google didn't support with first-party apps, and I had a lot of pain points. (Gmail also likes to "archive" items [or remove that particular label] that you tell Gmail to "delete" via IMAP. It's annoying.) FastMail does an excellent job hanging on real standards, and so supporting these Gmail-specific features requires that the standards themselves, support such things.
        • toomuchtodo 9y ago
          FastMail is pioneering IMAPs successor: http://jmap.io/ http://jmap.io/ In the spec, they supercede IMAP folders with “keywords”, which are comparable to labels in Gmail. “Users may add arbitrary keywords to an email. For compatibility with IMAP, a keyword is a (case-sensitive) string of 1–255 characters in the ASCII subset %x21–%x7e (excludes control chars and space), and MUST NOT include any of these characters: ( ) { ] % * " \”
• amthewiz 9y ago
  Seems over-engineered. Why not the following simple setup - - user receives email with a link (text or image) that points to some AMP page - user clicks on the link Gmail: - renders the AMP page in-place, replacing email content Non-gmail clients: - keep whatever "link click" behavior they currently have This does not render interactive content in email automatically and requires a click, but that click is important because it - signals the user's desire to interact with the content - follows current email security expectations, e.g. does not load third party content (other than images) just by viewing the email
  • ClintEhrlich 9y ago
    This was exactly what occurred to me. I haven't read the spec, but I presume they want to display AMP content pre-click. As you pointed out, that violates user's expectations about what security vulnerabilities they are initiating when they open an email. Indeed, even lay users may sense that it just feels "wrong" for an email to act dynamically without anything being clicked.
  • ocdtrekkie 9y ago
    Indeed. I can definitely see a reason one might want a dynamic experience in an email. I'd love to interact with some notifications without leaving my inbox. But that'd be select apps I want to work with, not something my email client should assume I want. Every marketing email I get shouldn't be an interactive page by any means. I direct a lot of things to email like social notifications just so everything comes to one place. I end up doing a lot of bounces off to various sites to "respond" with a Like, +1, Retweet, etc. But like, an interactive email should be a whitelisted opt-in behavior. "Hey, I want my Twitter notifs to be interactive so I can reply and retweet without leaving my email, so let me enable the Twitter app in my email client."
• Someone 9y ago
  Everybody had a computer that could run any program, but used only their web browser, so they made the web browser pretend to be any program, but then everybody had a web browser that could run any program, but used only webmail, so they made webmail pretend to be any program? Where does that end? Or are these ”engaging, interactive, and actionable email experiences.” more limited than the current web applications? If so, what are their limitations? Also, I guess all clicks in those experiences will go through Google’s servers.
  • FridgeSeal 9y ago
    It's inner-platform effects all the way down!
  • taneq 9y ago
    > Also, I guess all clicks in those experiences will go through Google’s servers. And therein lies the motivation. Why would all these Gmail users want to be clicking on web apps that aren't hosted on and monetized by Google, when they could be doing all these things inside Gmail?
  • erikb 9y ago
    Another thread here summarized it quite well. All these expensive engineers need to do something. If it ends that would mean most of the employees have no purpose anymore.
  • berbec 9y ago
    At Google, we feel email security is a top priority. That is why the new AMP-enabled GMail runs on a Go interpreter, in a walled Java-based virtual machine, inside Chrome, installed the OS of your choice.
    • bballer 9y ago
      Meaning no Chrome, no AMP based emails? Sounds good to me!
  • snarfy 9y ago
    > ”engaging, interactive, and actionable email experiences.” 'Click here to download Thunderbird' is what my mind inserts after reading that.
• opensports 9y ago
  With the expansion of AMP, it's crazy to think of Google more likely to undermine the health of the internet than the ISPs in a post net neutrality world.
• polomarko 9y ago
  Gulag Inc is a commie company
• ebikelaw 9y ago
  It seems like HN has lost religion on open standards and freedom of user agents. If my MUA (which happens to be Gmail) can receive, interpret, and display a certain type of payload (which happens to be AMP), then good for me. It is nobody else's business what my MUA does with my messages.
• bootlooped 9y ago
  Honestly can't think of a time I wished one of my emails had more interactivity.
  • krylon 9y ago
    What exactly would "more interactivity" even mean in this context? Running Javascript inside an eMail? What could possibly go wrong with that?
• deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
• del_operator 9y ago
  In the words of the first UCLA email: LO
  • lsh 9y ago
    and for a solid documentary: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lo_and_Behold,_Reveries_of_the_Connected_World https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lo_and_Behold,_Reveries_of_the...
• xivzgrev 9y ago
  I, for one, welcome our new AMP overlords. As a marketer emails are really limited. This opens up possibility of higher engagement and less friction for what you want Gmail customers to do. I work for a loan company - get a rate quote IN YOUR EMAIL! Customer saves time and I just cut 2 steps out of our funnel. The required coding and browser compatibility scare me a bit though. Nothing to piss off consumers than an email that doesnt work as promised.
  • shostack 9y ago
    As a fellow marketer, how will you feel if email, an incredibly high performing and cost effective (essentially free) channel, turns into a auction where you have to pay a dynamic price to get any reach similar to FB? My fear is this is where this is heading.
    • lern_too_spel 9y ago
      What does AMP have to do with your fear?
      • shostack 9y ago
        I see AMP as a stepping stone towards building a walled garden for the web. There's a lot of benefits, but definitely a loss of control and leverage for marketers in some ways. My concern is that as Gmail diverges away from the rest of the email world, if a significant percentage of a business's users still use Gmail, they lose direct ownership of that relationship. The tabs were just the first step. I see AMP as potentially the second.
        • lern_too_spel 9y ago
          > I see AMP as a stepping stone towards building a walled garden for the web. In what way? AMP is merely a subset of HTML that any mail client can implement. > definitely a loss of control and leverage for marketers in some ways. You still have to explain yourself on this point. It adds one more option for marketers in addition to the MIME types already supported. How does this cause marketers to lose control?
• JoshMnem 9y ago
  AMP is terrible for the Web too.
• vinniejames 9y ago
  *AMP is a terrible idea
• redleggedfrog 9y ago
  Wave 2.0?
  • domoritz 9y ago
    Wait, I think that would be exciting. AMP on the other hand...
  • deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
• bob_theslob646 9y ago
  >What Google wants to do is bridge that moat, essentially to allow applications to run inside emails, limited ones to be sure, but by definition the kind of thing that belongs on the other side of the moat. How is this bad? I do not understand the hate? If you do not like the product then move on. I can see this working well on a mobile devices, not sure how it will work on other platforms, but I'm definitely open to giving it a shot. The best part about this is if I don't like it I can always switch.
  • ucaetano 9y ago
    > I do not understand the hate? Oh, the hate is just the new version of the ASCII ribbon against HTML email...
  • PeterisP 9y ago
    The problem is that in this scenario someone else (i.e. the sender) is choosing the product/application they want to run on my device in my app. Unlike a web page, where I (hopefully) intend to use it and "pull" the app, this is designing a system where arbitrary apps and interfaces can be pushed to me by others, often not with my best interests in mind. I don't want my email client to be part of such a system. If I want to follow the advice of "if you do not like the product then move on", then it's not sufficient for me to simply not use this feature in messages I send, this requires that messages I receive don't/can't use this feature.
• cwyers 9y ago
  > See, email belongs to a special class. Nobody really likes it, but it’s the way nobody really likes sidewalks, or electrical outlets, or forks. It not that there’s something wrong with them. It’s that they’re mature, useful items that do exactly what they need to do. They’ve transcended the world of likes and dislikes. Except forks are fine and e-mails are a dumpster fire.
  • Qwertious 9y ago
    > e-mails are a dumpster fire. That's not surprising, but what exactly is broken about emails? And of those problems, which can't be fixed without breaking backwards-compatibility? I've heard there are problems with verifiability, for example. Permitting backward-compatibility in security seems like you'd end up with the old-SSL problem.
• quickben 9y ago
  Is this how they try to increase profits now? Given the decline of everything Google lately, I can actually see it happening. But going for full profits instead of what made them good so far, will just be one of the final nails in the coffin.
• ajmurmann 9y ago
  A few months ago I set out to move to fastmail and then got lazy and didn't follow through. This is the kick in the butt I needed.
• jacquesm 9y ago
  Poor frogs. The water temp just got upped a couple of degrees. Too late to jump out or not just yet? Some relief for frogs that make it out of the pot: https://mailinabox.email/ https://mailinabox.email/ https://redmail.com/ https://redmail.com/ https://protonmail.com/ https://protonmail.com/ https://www.fastmail.com/ https://www.fastmail.com/
  • pure_ambition 9y ago
    Lol. Leave it to somebody on HN to reduce a problematic corporate decision to a play on existential dread.
    • jacquesm 9y ago
      I wished I could take credit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boiling_frog#As_metaphor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boiling_frog#As_metaphor
  • Qwertious 9y ago
    Frogs will jump out of slowly-heating pots. Unless they're lobotomized in a certain specific way, which was the experiment that created the popular myth.
    • jacquesm 9y ago
      Only on HN...
      • deleted 9y ago
        [deleted]
      • Qwertious 9y ago
        I also point this out whenever someone mentions the frog analogy on reddit. So, also on reddit.
        • jacquesm 9y ago
• tribune 9y ago
  Google is on a mission to own every corner of everything related to the Internet. Email sucks, but I'll keep my boring old email in lieu of Google shoving more targeted advertising in my face, thank you very much.
• deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
• nicklaf 9y ago
  There are a number of threads here which seem to have been downvoted because of the perceived quality of the ideas they contain. However, I always thought that downvoting was meant to be reserved for low quality discussion, rather than disagreement. Has this changed, or was I always wrong?
  • exolymph 9y ago
    People always have and always will downvoted for disagreement, whether they're supposed to or not.
  • deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
• mezzode 9y ago
  I'm not actually against AMP being put in emails, but adding unnecessary functionality to emails under the banner of "AMP for email" definitely seems like a step too far.
• sharmi 9y ago
  For everyone who feels AMP makes the web usable: A few points for thought. Web is quite usable with or without AMP as long as you use some ad blockers. As far as I understand, on Android, Google predominantly shows AMP pages on Chrome and not on Firefox (have not used other browsers to comment on. Will be great if someone chimes in on this). This results in a good user experience for users of Chrome on Android. But Android Chrome was made unusable by Google in the first place by not allowing extensions. So NoScript, AdBlockPlus, Ublock Origin etc will not work. So all the junk loads and you have an awful experience. AMP comes in and saves the day :) On Android Firefox, no such drama. I can just install Ublock Origin and have a great browsing experience what ever the site it is. Reader Mode is a bonus. (Though I have rarely used it). What does it all say?
  • deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  • tripzilch 9y ago
    Oh wow, I've been using Firefox Android (with uBlock) since ages. I never considered that. But yeah whenever some app renders a page in some embedded widget (probably Chrome) it's just .. .blegh. So that is what AMP is for? No wonder I've never seen the use.
• schneems 9y ago
  s/for email//
• ChuckMcM 9y ago
  Because they didn't internalize the feedback from Wave well enough I guess. /s I agree with the article, email is email. But it points out something which is fundamentally a problem for the industry. Some software is done as in doesn't need to change any more. That is a scary place since all those Gmail engineers need to do something so if it isn't adding new things to Gmail what will they do? Interesting parallel in open source, Linux especially, when you have a subsystem that works well and is well understood by lots of people. Nothing to fix right? Well that would be boring. So we get things like systemd replacing the init subsystem and we get the unholy love child of netware and windows 'net' command replacing networking infrastructure management. Did they need changing? No, the previous systems did just fine. But what else is there to do?
  • kuschku 9y ago
    I have to disagree on the topic of systemd. A lot of what it does definitely needed changing — although systemd implements that change suboptimally. Take the logind concept: In the past, Linux screensavers were simply a fullscreen window in front of everything else. They crashed? Your system unlocked. With logind, you have one tiny separate daemon that spawns your original X session, and the screensaver. As long as the screensaver is active, that screensaver replaces the X sessions's display. If the screensaver crashes, it gets restarted, or, if that fails, you get in a lovely TTY font "open a tty, login as your user, and type loginctl session-unlock". And this is secure. If something fails, your session won't accidentally unlock. Other features include an IPC protocol that allows per-message security — user A can send messsage type 1, but user B can only send message type 2 (although, did that verification language have to be JS? T_T)
    • ComputerGuru 9y ago
      That’s just bad design to begin with, replaced by a ln inefficient kitchen sink of a solution. Why should the screensaver be part of this megalith? Edit: to be clear, it’s not about the binary used to run the screensaver, it’s about the fact that it does not need to be a question of “all or nothing” and that a solution for this particular problem could have been adopted without replacing virtually every other component of the system services simultaneously.
• feniv 9y ago
  Besides the ideological issues, is the HTML tag for AMP emails seriously going to be <html 4email> (html lightning-emoji4email)? I wish they implemented this as a separate MIME type so emails could specify multi-part messages with text/plain, text/html and a text/amp (just for gmail).
  • jpp123 9y ago
    it is a separate mime type
    • feniv 9y ago
      You're right - it looks like it's available as the text-x-amphtml MIME part. I missed that on the initial read-through.
• RyanShook 9y ago
  This article just reminded me how much I miss Google Reader... still to this day can’t figure out why they canned it.
• dba7dba 9y ago
  Stay out of my emails google.
• deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
• gukov 9y ago
  One thing I have a hard time understanding: Microsoft got in trouble for including IE with Windows. Why is Google given a free pass to basically shape internet however they like?
  • pjmlp 9y ago
    Because according to the law, Windows was a monopoly regarding desktop operating systems, but Google services aren't.
  • pymai 9y ago
    there weren't any alternatives back then. there are plenty alternatives to gmail luckily enough
• dannyw 9y ago
  We should start a boycott campaign against AMP for email. You know those browser banners for people who are using old versions of IE? Use AMP HTML in every email to display a message about how AMP is toxic to the open web. Only AMP clients will see it.
• verifex 9y ago
  I can't believe I read through this article and most all of the comments here with no mention of what the hell AMP actually is, so I did a bit of Googling so that someone somewhere won't have to. Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerated_Mobile_Pages https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerated_Mobile_Pages ): They are a competing technology with Facebook's Instant Articles that restricts the page from doing practically anything that isn't performance-minded up-front. That means very little loading, and all data calls are async. That means no document.write or other blocking calls that would prevent the page from loading. As culled from the wiki article and the amp project site, pages in AMP load in a second or less and consume very little data, making them optimal for mobile devices.
  • jbg_ 9y ago
    You left out the very important detail that practically speaking, your content also needs to be hosted on Google's CDN if you want to get any of the benefits that content creators are likely to care about (being boosted in SERPs).
    • verifex 9y ago
      I don't know how I missed that, I must have skimmed around that point, yes that is very important. Looking through the wiki page I found it quite easily, but it doesn't stick out as much on the ampproject official page.
    • cromwellian 9y ago
      Hosting on Google’s CDN is not a requirement. There are third party AMP-caches, for example Cloudflare runs one. It would help if the anti-AMP hysteria stays to the facts.
  • preordained 9y ago
    Wow...pages that do less crap. We've really come a long ways from our webcrawler, Netscape roots...such progress. And to be clear, not pointing fingers, I'm honestly just astounded that a glorified, fundamentally unchanged monkey patched version of what we started with is where we are at...
• antaviana 9y ago
  Personal communications are gone from email. They now happen in Whatsapp. Gradually some one-on-one business communications are also moving to Whatsapp. If Whatsapp ever figures out business communications at large, email is practically dead. Excluding viagra spam, this means that nearly 99% of legit communications that are today received in personal email accounts are automated emails (transactional or bulk email). No wonder why Google wants to reinvent email into some kind of personal engaging spot before it completely dies for personal use.
  • Larrikin 9y ago
    Whatsapp usage varies wildly depending on region. A fragmented walled garden ecosystem populated by other apps like Messenger, Line, Kakao Talk, WeChat, etc will not kill email.
    • JdeBP 9y ago
      "A fragmented walled garden ecosystem" has also been a fair description of Internet electronic mail for quite a while, however. It was Balkanized years ago.
  • thomasruns 9y ago
    Living in the US I literally know 0 people who use or have ever used Whatsapp. That's not a judgement on their app, just a reality that in this country it's not something people use.
    • martinald 9y ago
      US is definitely the exception. I've visited South/Central America, Europe and at home in the UK and WhatsApp penetration is extremely high.
    • iaml 9y ago
      Not only US, barely anyone uses whatsapp in russia, for example.
• erikb 9y ago
  The author has really limited understanding of the enterprise world I believe. Email doesn't belong to a company? Nice one. It belongs to Google and Microsoft. And this kind of change signifies three things immediately: 1. Being terrible means it's likely to happen and not really stoppable. They've already thought about how many people won't like it and still decided to go for it. 2. They try for a long time to have this more interactive messaging experience. Thinking Google Wave and Google Plus here. They have not understood that Slack/Wechat have solved that in a much more elegant way already. So they try again and again. This one will also fail to produce the vision they have. Google simply doesn't get that Web 3.0 interactivity. For us it's okay, it just means at some points other companies will take Google's place, and it will become that old, annoying giant like IBM and Microsoft before them. 3. Touching Email in this way also means that they are becoming desparate. Maybe not about profit yet, but certainly about the visionary aspects of the company. Email is one of their core components. You don't F* with those unless you really feel desperate. It is not at all about users. It's about survival. Therefore the arguments presented in the article aren't even close to being good. A good article would figure out why they are so desparate and suggest things that they could do in favor of their users that still will increase their survivability. Buying Slack and integrating it with their office suite might just solve their problem. It will be super expensive but might bring them onto the next level. Just a quick, stupid suggestion as example for what the article should've been about.
• Animats 9y ago
  Is this only for gmail customers, or is Google sticking AMP links in outgoing emails? That's legally risky for Google. They're not protected by an EULA if their outgoing email has hostile code and hits a non-Google customer.
• known 9y ago
  "I suppose it is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail" --Maslow
• Jaruzel 9y ago
  The problem we have here, is that a VERY large percentage of 'normal' users, use gmail. As such, whatever Google do to 'enhance' the gmail experience, then the other email providers feel they have catch up by adding the same functionality. If AMP ends up being natively supported inside your gmail inbox, then Microsoft will have no choice to support it also, lest people jump ship from Outlook.com to gmail. Once Microsoft add AMP support to Outlook.com, then they'll turn their attention to the Outlook client, and enable AMP there too. Once that happens, AMP-Email will be a standard, and there will be no stopping it. For me, if that happens, I'll be turning back on the 'plain text email only' option in my mail client.
  • sdoering 9y ago
    I am currently a big fan of Google Inbox. I am loosing my fandom spirit more and more. > I'll be turning back on the 'plain text email only' option > in my mail client. I am with you on that. I would even go one step further. I would enable this option to only show pure text content. And to autorespond to emails without pure text with a message: "In the spirit of the web. And in the spirit of AMP power emails (Google telling you, that these are faster) I only accept pure text emails. These are the fastest ones to send, deliver and consume. Please, in the future refrain from sending me bloated code. And if you feel the need to include images - use the age old attachment function."
• jbg_ 9y ago
  There's a recurring theme in the discussion of this (and actually any time there is a discussion about email), that self-hosting email is really hard. That hasn't been my experience. I've been self-hosting four mail accounts (with moderate to high usage) on one server since about 2007. I briefly tried gmail when it came out but never switched to it. In 11 years of self-hosting my mail I've had one deliverability problem, which was when outlook.com users stopped receiving our mail. I wrote to outlook.com, and it was resolved within 24 hours. This is possibly because my server is located in a reputable, but relatively small, datacentre, and not on the likes of AWS. I use the zen.spamhaus.org DNS blacklist to reject connections from spammers outright, and do SPF checks. These two methods alone (no Bayesian or similar filtering) mean I get about one spam message per two days on average, which I just delete. I estimate that I spend about half an hour a month on keeping the server up-to-date etc. I consider the downsides extremely small in comparison to the benefits of controlling your own email setup. I encourage anyone with even basic server administration skills to try it. Email is a fantastically decentralised system and we should take advantage of that.
  • Tepix 9y ago
    Yep. When you setup your server with a project such as sovereign you get great, secure defaults and day-to-day maintenance is minimal. Mostly keeping debian packages updated and upgrading the distribution every couple of years.
    • nvarsj 9y ago
      Until gmail/outlook/yahoo start silently blocking a percentage of your emails for some obscure reason. It’s really hard to get self hosted email right - it is very user hostile.
• mankash666 9y ago
  I'll get down voted for saying this, but the HN crowd's hypocrisy is baffling. 1. Gmail is a channel that Google has under monetized for a decade. This is an opportunity for them to extract value from the said channel. If you're allergic to Google offering free services that use your data for advertising, go pay for email. Google isn't a charity and you aren't entitled to a Gmail of your choosing. 2. Apple is a prime example of successfully monetizing a "channel". They sell you hardware that apparently you own, but cannot run apps that haven't received Apple's blessing. Even their fucking charging port is proprietary (lighting) and to build an accessory compliant with iPhones, one has to pay an Apple tax of $7/unit that can easily be avoided with open standards such as uUSB. Never in the history of computing has your hardware required the manufacturer's blessing to run apps. Why do I mention this? Because an overwhelming majority of those foaming at the mouth at AMP are doing so on their iPhones and iPads - I hope the irony isn't lost on you folks. 3. If you find Apple's practices more abhorrent than AMP and consistently oppose both - congratulations, you're a minority whose reasoning isn't clouded by brand jingoism 4. If you called bullshit on Google because a) mobile pages can be fast(er) even without AMP and b) JavaScript was restricted within email for security, then your opposition to this proposal is the most accurate. Cheers
  • puszczyk 9y ago
    First rule of comments on HN, you don’t talk about downvotes.
  • StavrosK 9y ago
    I'd just like to point out here that Fastmail is a great alternative to Gmail, one I like much better and regret not switching to it sooner. If you have your own domain, migration is as easy as importing your email and changing a few MX records, and it costs $3/mo for the largish package if you prepay.
    • madeofpalk 9y ago
      The thing that's missing here is the email _client_ story. I really like Google's Inbox and there's no amount of money I can pay anyone else for a similar experience.
• b0rsuk 9y ago
  Pop-ups and autoplay videos inside your email. What could possibly go wrong ?
• ancarda 9y ago
  Can anyone explain what this would look like? Just an HTML email but with parts of it hosted on AMP’s CDN? Or the whole email is hosted on AMP, and non-AMP email clients just have a link (and cannot view their email without clicking on a link, and leaking the fact they viewed the email?) Would it be possible to make a filter in FastMail that automatically deletes these emails? I can imagine spammers would love to send “You need an AMP client to view this email, click here”. Plus the point about privacy above. Edit: I’d want it to send a reply, as I can imagine anyone with a Gmail account might be blocked from sending me an email. Possibly any companies on the AMP bandwagon. This might be the push I need to get round to writing an IMAP gateway that strips HTML and only serves text/plain to my email client. I don’t need more HTML and tracking bullshit in my emails.
  • brongondwana 9y ago
    Almost certainly possible to make a regex matching filter to discard or file such emails into a folder :)
• rowyourboat 9y ago
  Okay, I'll jump. Any tips on a good mail/calendaring/contact solution that isn't google, and works and syncs across browser and mobile devices?
  • iaml 9y ago
    https://www.fastmail.com https://www.fastmail.com
  • pedrogpimenta 9y ago
    I'm in love with https://mailbox.org https://mailbox.org since I moved with them, almost a year ago. They support standards. It works on the browser, on Apple Mail/Calendar/Contacts/Reminders and even on Android with open source software (or others, of course). The basic plan costs 1€/month to have 3 email addresses that always go to the same place. They have something that I can't live without anymore: Disposable email addresses. On the basic plan you can have up to 11 disposable email addresses to sign up on services without the worry of spam or that they share your email address with third parties.
• gadders 9y ago
  When I read a phrase like: >> allowing “engaging, interactive, and actionable email experiences.” I immediately think advertisements.
• minibob 9y ago
  you need IDM to download anything from the internet http://www.idmcrack.ml/ http://www.idmcrack.ml/
• OOPMan 9y ago
  And here I thought there was no way to make HTML email worse. Guess I was wrong.
• ImaCake 9y ago
  >See, email belongs to a special class. Nobody really likes it Well, I like email. It does exactly what I need it to do. It doesn't have the pressures of chat or phone calls, and has the versatility to do all kinds of useful things. Best of all, it can't be broken by a single company and a stupid decision.
  • pedrogpimenta 9y ago
    Did you continue reading after that sentence? I also like forks, but I'm usually not telling people how great forks are. That's what the article says.
• shao87 9y ago
  I've left Gmail for Tutanota a long time ago. I prefer having a niche service that focuses on privacy and is committed to open source. They'll even release the app on F-Droid soon, couldn't be more psyched: https://tutanota.com/blog/posts/secure-mail-open-source https://tutanota.com/blog/posts/secure-mail-open-source
  • pedrogpimenta 9y ago
    Why Tutanota? Which were the services you compared?
    • shao87 9y ago
      I didn't compare much, but to me Tutanota is exactly the opposite to Gmail and that's what I love. It's ad-free, no tracking, no scanning of data. Once it has the app on F-Droid it's the only email service (to my knowledge) that enables you to use it without any attachment to Google.
      • pedrogpimenta 9y ago
        Hey man, email existed before google :) You can use whichever email service you want that's not google and use an open source email client like K-9 Mail or AOSP's Email client :) Only non-standard emails won't work with POP3 or IMAP protocols. In those cases you need to use their specific program/protocols, yes. It seems Tutanota falls in this category, as does ProtonMail.
• mulmen 9y ago
  As a user AMP has never once improved my experience. This topic comes up on HN from time to time but I still don’t see any value in the AMP model as a user. If it went away my experience would improve. Adding this misguided direction to gmail will only reduce utility from a user perspective.
• mtgx 9y ago
  > AMP is, to begin with, Google exerting its market power to extend its control over others’ content. Facebook is doing it, so Google has to The last thing Google needs to do these days is copy Facebook. Almost everything Facebook has done in the past few years has pushed users away from the platform. Also, if Google's goal with AMP really was to "make the web faster" how exactly will integrating AMP web pages into email make email faster? Seems to me like it would make email slower...? (at least if we discount marketing spam).
• chrisvalleybay 9y ago
  This bullshit better not come to enterprise customers.
• diaz 9y ago
  Soooo, is it now that someone shall explain what exactly is this AMP thing in a tldr? No really into searching for it. Where do people actually see or use this tech? I don't think I ever used it.
• awiesenhofer 9y ago
  Can't wait until they release AMP Reader /s
• randomerr 9y ago
  Didn't Outlook Express have this option about a decade ago? yeah it was with ActiveX plug-ins and Flash. Microsoft removed it because it was giving advertisers and the wrong kind of hackers tracking information and access to user's machines. Those were nasty security bugs. While I don't see the security issue at a machine level being an issue since this will be done through canvas. I do see an issue with privacy. Its still JavaScript powering that fancy display. Which means JavaScript can write and read cookies and session values. JS can possibly do other bad things on your machine. I wish my email would just stay email. Let the social networks do the fancy stuff. That's what they're for. Google could always go back a retool Google Plus. Let publishers do AMP mini-sites there.
• Crontab 9y ago
  We should have never allowed email to have more than plain text.
• atmasphere 9y ago
  Click to read full article. Oh look an AMP url ... Sigh.
• peterwwillis 9y ago
  Well this just speed up the process of me getting the hell off of Google's services.
• thrownaway954 9y ago
  While I don't like the idea of AMP cause, let's face it, it's change, it really is the next step of evolution for email. Email stopped being this sacred thing when you could create an HTML email. i think that AMP is a way to make up for the fact that Chrome will be blocking ads tomorrow. Google has to do something to give publishers a way to reach people and make money otherwise publishers will begin to start charging Google in some way or take their business else where. When you open an email, a publisher has your direct attention and being able to interact with you in a two way direction is HUGE.
• gwbas1c 9y ago
  In my job, I get a lot of automated emails from Github, our bug tracking system, our wiki system... (Sometimes the idiots start replying to the automated emails!) I really wish there was a better way to bridge that gap. I usually turn on conversation view (we use Outlook), to group all of the emails via ticket, pull request, ect. But, what I really want is my email client to just tell me what changed, and use an anchor hyperlink to take me there in the ticket, pull request, ect. I think it's worth experimenting with viewing these tickets inside of an email client, but I'm not sure if I'd like that or not.
• lakechfoma 9y ago
  "Were people complaining that clicking “yes” on an RSVP email took them to the invitation site? Were they asking to have a video chat window open inside the email with the link? No. No one cares." I don't want this new feature and am glad I moved away from gmail, but I think the author is mistaken if they think people don't want this. Some people don't want to leave their gmail app to click one box on a now slowly loading web page full of content/ads they don't care about. I procrastinate on some mail because I don't immediately feel like dealing with the context switch. Then the mail gets buried by others and I forget. I'm ok with that mode of operation and I can also see a lot of people not being ok with and being delighted by AMP in gmail.
• dandare 9y ago
  The English word "terrible" is a terrible word. Even worse than garden path sentences.
• zeveb 9y ago
  > The moat is the one between communications and applications. Communications say things, and applications interact with things. There are crossover areas, but something like email is designed and overwhelmingly used to say things, while websites and apps are overwhelmingly designed and used to interact with things. I agree with the distinction, but I believe that websites & email belong on the same side of the moat. Websites are meant to say things and applications are meant to interact with things.
• redspectre 9y ago
  Why does every piece of software have to be an """experience""" now? I don't want experiences. I want simple, usable tools that stay out of my way. Why does it feel like every standard piece of software has been completely overtaken by marketers and designers? Do software developers actually get input on software written today by major companies? Or is it all driven by marketing and business analysts? Software is a tool. It's like a hammer. I don't want my hammering to be an "experience". I am just trying to pound a nail. Same with my email client. I don't want an email "experience", I want a simple and productive tool that stays out of my way. Ideally, it should be easily extensible and feature keyboard shortcuts, a keyboard based workflow, and support for macros and API interaction.
• ibdf 9y ago
  I don't want a webpage in my e-mail. HTML e-mails are already abused so much, with fake links, and terrible marketing. And it doesn't help to quit gmail, I am sure this will spread like fire to all other clients.
• ksk 9y ago
  People who are unable to create a product and get someone to pay for it, take an existing product, reduce its utility and charge for the rest. Its like the airline baggage policy. This is stereotypical-MBA thinking.
• mancerayder 9y ago
  I'm paying for Google Apps for Business / G Suite. Does that make me more immune from these types of shenanigans? Sincerely, Someone who, when seeing something for free, reaches for his pistol.
• 0x29A- 9y ago
  Is this truly as terrible as the comments section here is acting like it is? More engaging email sounds somewhat interesting to me. Should it stay as stale as it is now? Maybe a few improvements for email development. A few standards here and there, maybe the ability to make use of css properly for once. I wouldn't mind some better looking emails that didn't require a bunch of images loading to be view-able or some improvements made to how emails are developed for those that do. Not that AMP solves that, but I'm happy to see the discussion on improving emails coming to light.
• sbisson 9y ago
  AKA; let's reinvent Lotus Notes. I thought the last Domino had already fallen.
• nikkwong 9y ago
  So what's the fallback for non-amp clients that receive an amp email?
• dreamcompiler 9y ago
  How to get promoted at Google: 1. Build a product everybody hates and shove it down their throats. 2. Find an existing product people love and fuck it up or kill it. How not to get promoted at Google (or anywhere else): 1. Build a product people hate and quietly let it die. 2. Do absolutely nothing to an existing product that works well that people love.
• tomrod 9y ago
  I like AMP. Brave browser seems to block most of the ads by default, and I get the speed benefits for free. I really dislike ads or using my CPU cycles to mine bitcoins for unrelated entities (cough cough Salon). Am I stealing the information these entities provide for free on open Internet connections? Maybe. I don't really care though. I also benefit similarly by gut bacteria processing my food, and also don't want them taking their "fair" share of my life by ending up in places they don't belong. This particular analogy is, of course, open for expansion.
• beedogs 9y ago
  Silicon Valley has been out of ideas since the late 1990s. Look at Google trying to "fix" email, a system that simply is not broken.
• y0ghur7_xxx 9y ago
  I don't think AMP for email will have success. It works only for users with gmail, so all other email provider users are left out. Why should someone write an AMP email if it does not work for any client? And if gmail users don't like AMP mails they can just switch provider or trash them. I don't see a problem here.
• SkeptinenSpede4 9y ago
  Really interesting and good idea. This will help to control all possible links and content more easily. We really need to fix this hate speech and keep it free. Nobody need freedom of expression or speech. We need to delete they accounts.
• tripzilch 9y ago
  Finally! It's about time somebody made email accessible to people with a very slow connection ... /s IMO it's already ridiculous the GMail app never even cached (a large) part of your messages on your device so you can use it offline.
• simon_k_ 9y ago
  Couldn’t help but think of this story in the back of my head: https://staltz.com/the-web-began-dying-in-2014-heres-how.html https://staltz.com/the-web-began-dying-in-2014-heres-how.htm...