57 ms·

Google launches AMP for email

• ocdtrekkie 8y ago
  We couldn't stop it. :| Back when it was announced, several people brought concerns up with the supposedly open AMP project, and they were closed or locked, and the head of AMP blocked us. During that time, we found out that while AMP was supposedly "open", Google teams such as Gmail and Search would implement it however they wanted, and that no open governance would impact them at all. In essence, the idea that it was open was only so far as Google would also like you to implement whatever Google was already doing.
  • jasti 8y ago
    The spec has support from Outlook, Yahoo and others: https://blog.amp.dev/2019/03/26/building-the-future-of-email-with-amp/ https://blog.amp.dev/2019/03/26/building-the-future-of-email...
    • ocdtrekkie 8y ago
      The problem with monopolies is that nobody else has a choice. If Outlook or Yahoo were to fail to adopt the proprietary Gmail standard, they would eventually end up incompatible with the now-proprietary format of email. Whilst AMP4Email can fall back to HTML, the reality, as with text-only emails after HTML, that many providers will not bother sending multiple formats. Your team has repeatedly refused to address criticisms of AMP from users and the community at large, and continued forward with a program that nobody wants[1]. There's still no way for someone to opt out of AMP as a whole except to use a search engine that doesn't support it, and Gmail seems to lack an AMP switch in settings, so I'm guessing you currently have no plans to let Gmail users escape it either. [1] https://twitter.com/googleampsucks https://twitter.com/googleampsucks - Endless retweets of people's thoughts on AMP.
      • fixermark 8y ago
        Or, based on the evidence... ... Microsoft and Yahoo think it's a good idea and want to support it. There's no particular reason email needs to sit around in the gutter while the rest of the web gets more multimedia and more performant.
        • dragonwriter 8y ago
          > There's no particular reason email needs to sit around in the gutter while the rest of the web gets more multimedia and more performant. Email is not part of the web, and more multimedia and more round trips is not more performant, it's the opposite.
          • fixermark 8y ago
            > Email is not part of the web Content-Type: text/html seems to disagree with your assertion.
            • mftrhu 8y ago
              The HTML documentation sitting in my /usr/share/doc does not make it part of the web. The output from man -H is not part of the web, no matter what its mime type is. HTML is not the same as the web.
          • jxdxbx 8y ago
            Email should be plain text. HTML in email itself was a terrible idea, though not as bad as AMP in email.
            • felixfbecker 8y ago
              Some HTML in email is fine, I would say the subset that can be expressed by markdown. Making text bold, italic etc should be possible. The real problem I have is how limited email HTML/CSS and email clients are compared to the web, so that every "rich" email will use table layouts that render terribly on mobile.
    • JohnFen 8y ago
      ...and the contagion is already spreading. This effort destroys half of what makes email useful. I know that moving forward, I won't accept amp emails. If anyone sends me one, I'll just have to tell them to please send me a plain-text copy if they really want me to see it. On the plus side, this could make spam much easier to detect: if it's amp-based, then it's most likely to be spam.
      • TomMarius 8y ago
        I am already not reading HTML emails if I'm not expecting them (e.g. confirmation link).
        • JohnFen 8y ago
          Yes, I disallow HTML as well. Well, technically, I don't allow HTML to render. If the email is important, then I'll read the HTML source myself and extract the parts that are important.
          • EGreg 8y ago
            Why??
            • bildung 8y ago
              Because HTML mails are almost always spam anyway.
              • floren 8y ago
                And disabling HTML should help you avoid tracking pixels which tell the sender if you opened the email or not, etc.
                • rypskar 8y ago
                  You don't need to disable HTML for that. Thunderbird blocks remote content in HTML by default and only displays images embedded in the email. Isn't the tracking pixel mostly snake oil since it mostly tell if the user use gmail (preloading images) or an email client that block remote content by default?
    • NeedMoreTea 8y ago
      So the spec has support from those most likely to benefit from email tracking and walling off. Will email go the way of xmpp?
    • TazeTSchnitzel 8y ago
      Whereas Fastmail think it is a bad idea (unclear if they'll support it in future): https://fastmail.blog/2018/02/14/email-is-your-electronic-memory/ https://fastmail.blog/2018/02/14/email-is-your-electronic-me...
    • hw 8y ago
      The future of email should be a deprecation of email. Email is an archaic system, where different clients implement their own versions of rendering or sanitizing email. Some platforms don't even include proper email headers. Now there's this 'AMP' that's being shoved up our throats. Not to mention the nuances around deliverability like spf records and dkim. There's also the issue of spam. I'd love to see email go away and more modern messaging platforms take its place. Having worked on apps and platforms that work with and parse email, email is not the future.
      • rainonmoon 8y ago
        I don't disagree that there's room to move away from email, but how do the current crop of messaging services promise to overcome the problems you mentioned? They all seem as varied in their implementations as you suggest email is. I'll also add that I think if something were to replace email, hopefully it would incorporate the slow response expectation of it. IM etc usually implies an expectation of an immediate answer; the length and expectation of not receiving an immediate reply afforded by email is immensely valuable.
      • taeric 8y ago
        Having different clients is probably an anti fragile mechanism of email. It literally helps keep it around and mostly working. I think the single worst thing to happen to email is the consolidation to so few vendors, ironically. This move is not changing my view. Does make me think heavily of ditching Gmail as a client. I was using emacs, but can't with advanced protection turned on. :(
      • progval 8y ago
        I'm worried that if email gets deprecated, it will be deprecated by a proprietary service because it's more convenient for users (or worse: several incompatible services, most of which proprietary). Like IRC mostly got replaced by Slack and Discord.
      • gumby 8y ago
        > Email is an archaic system, where different clients implement their own versions of rendering As opposed to web browsers which all perform identically?
    • discordance 8y ago
      Agreement between big corps on specs hasn't stopped dominance by one player in the past. Look at HTML5 for an example, with Edge now running on top of Chromium.
  • bitpush 8y ago
    I disagree. I think its a good idea to have safe options, and let developers come up with creative ways of building things on top of it.
    • ocdtrekkie 8y ago
      Nothing about AMP for Email is safe. It introduces new ways for senders to revise history after an email has been sent. Sent an ad claiming that you had a given price for a full week, and then decided you didn't want to sell it for that anymore two days later? Handy that you can remove all evidence of your advertisement after you sent it. It also introduces an entirely new playground for phishing scams, which I think you'll see using an abundance of new tricks, after Google has extremely unwisely made users comfortable entering data into emails they receive. The head of the AMP project threatened to "enforce the CoC" on people who brought up these valid concerns.
      • bitpush 8y ago
        "Sent an ad claiming that you had a given price for a full week, and then decided you didn't want to sell it for that anymore two days later?" How is that different from - I saw a price for a flight on the website, but now its gone. If it was going to change, why did they show it to me?
        • ceejayoz 8y ago
          There's a reasonable expectation that a website may get updated. The same is not true for mail.
          • cramforce 8y ago
            Emails already support updating by including external image references inside the email. AMP for email makes json requests proxied by the email client. Your client can decide to only make these requests once and then keep them stable or to show you a version history of the state of your email upon every time you opened it.
  • ucaetano 8y ago
    > while AMP was supposedly "open", Google teams such as Gmail and Search would implement it however they wanted, and that no open governance would impact them at all And that's exactly how any open standard works, isn't it? Or were you expecting that some standard board would have power over Google (or any other company) and be able to dictate how Google (or any other company) can implement the standard or not?
    • zamadatix 8y ago
      Your statement is overly broad, open standards bodies certainly can and have shaped how Google and others implement things, and will continue to do so. Standing up an open standards body in itself does not create pressure though it has to be stood up with backing by different groups with vested interest in guiding the design. This is where the AMP open standards group failed.
      • Ajedi32 8y ago
        Different groups such as... Yahoo and Microsoft? https://verizon-postmaster.tumblr.com/post/183699380323/amp-support-in-yahoo-mail https://verizon-postmaster.tumblr.com/post/183699380323/amp-... https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/Outlook-Blog/Support-for-AMP-HTML-preview-in-Outlook-com/ba-p/382832 https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/Outlook-Blog/Support-...
        • zamadatix 8y ago
          Users of AMP do not necessarily have a vested interest in the design beyond "I'm able to use it if I want". This is e.g. the difference (or at least was for the last ~decade) between mail.yahoo.com using a web feature vs Firefox/Chrome/IE/Safari implementing a web feature.
          • Ajedi32 8y ago
            How about this then? There are members from Microsoft, Twitter, and Pinterest on the project's technical steering committee: https://github.com/ampproject/meta-tsc https://github.com/ampproject/meta-tsc
  • skybrian 8y ago
    It seems unsurprising that joining a project with the purpose of stopping it would fail. Wouldn't that be the case with any open source project? The goal is that people who want to work on a thing together can collaborate, not to come to agreement with all the other people who hate the whole idea?
    • wmf 8y ago
      Proper standards bodies generally have a "should we even create this standard?" stage but AMP skipped it.
      • skybrian 8y ago
        They do, but it's also common for some major players in an industry to form an organization to standardize something and for other players (who disagree or don't care) not to join. In the end, it's about market acceptance. If few people use it, it's likely that Google will eventually cancel it.
        • dmitriid 8y ago
          Google has monopoly in search, and near-monopoly in desktop email. People are forced to use it, whether they like it or not.
          • Ajedi32 8y ago
            Nobody's "forced" to use it. Users can turn off AMP in Gmail, and email authors can continue to just use HTML emails if they don't like AMP. HTML emails will continue to display in Gmail just fine for the foreseeable future.
            • dmitriid 8y ago
              “Forseeable future”. Aka “as soon as Google decides they benefit more from AMP”. Much like “we won’t ever use AMP to rig search results”. And yes, users are forced to use AMP through their search, for example.
  • anth_anm 8y ago
    > In essence, the idea that it was open was only so far as Google would also like you to implement whatever Google was already doing. Standard for anything google makes open. Which is why being "open source" is not enough.
  • pmontra 8y ago
    > During that time, we found out that while AMP was supposedly "open", Google teams such as Gmail and Search would implement it however they wanted Reminds me of the doc/xls formats with the difference that those were proprietary and become (controversially) open as a response to the standardization of the odt/ods formats
  • ionised 8y ago
    Sounds like Chromium.
• CalRobert 8y ago
  Pretty classic Embrace, Extend, Extinguish. I expect nothing will render right in Thunderbird pretty soon.
  • bitpush 8y ago
    emails are packages with different representations in it. You have the classic "plantext" version and "html" version in emails today. What this is doing is adding another one to it. Mutt, for instance, discards "html" and renders just the "plaintext" version. AMP emails would just be another part of the same email. Nothing would stop working.
    • PaulHoule 8y ago
      Yeah, but messing with email is scary. Email is still an open platform and if Google gets complete control of it then there is no open platform that people actually use.
      • dymk 8y ago
        Google isn't the only one implementing AMP for email, nor are they the sole controller of what AMP implementations look like. It's an open spec. Yahoo, Outlook, and Mail.ru support it.
        • PaulHoule 8y ago
          Unfortunately "HTML + JS" based is no longer open. Commercially competitive web browsers are absent on open (not Apple) platforms which leaves the Chrome + Firefox duopoly. Somehow Google will help Firefox stumble along since it will keep them out of trouble with the antitrust courts.
      • cramforce 8y ago
        AMP including AMP for email is governed by a multi-company Technical Steering Committee as well as Advisory Committee since last year. https://blog.amp.dev/2019/03/06/encouraging-more-voices-in-amp/ https://blog.amp.dev/2019/03/06/encouraging-more-voices-in-a... AMP for email has support by Outlook, Yahoo, and Mail.ru, so it very much isn't under Google's control.
• hrktb 8y ago
  The actual announcement: https://gsuiteupdates.googleblog.com/2019/03/dynamic-email-in-gmail-beta.html https://gsuiteupdates.googleblog.com/2019/03/dynamic-email-i...
• bitpush 8y ago
  Dont know about others, but that demo of making comments on Google Docs sold it for me. Time and again, I click on email notifications just to respond to comments. This makes it very convenient.
• dkhenry 8y ago
  A few months ago when I moved I set up my network to DNS blackhole known Tracker's and Ad serving sites. Since then I have gotten more complaints about people not being able to use email since it turns out almost every email I get today is laced with tracking of some sort. I do not want any more smarts in my emails, I just want text that gets sent back and forth. I know this article claims this will help "Get things done", but I feel it will just be used to track and sell things to me even more then people currently try to.
  • pfortuny 8y ago
    What? So there are mail servers which do not deliver? What the heck is this crap?
    • eponeponepon 8y ago
      Email has been slowly balkanising itself for years now. By way of example, I know personally several people who run mail relays and not only refuse to relay messages from and to Google email servers but even refuse to _receive_ emails addressed to their users from GMail addresses. All of this on what is essentially a political objection. In the fullness of time, email will fail as a communication medium because of these situations. I don't think that Google will mind terribly when it does.
      • thaumaturgy 8y ago
        It's not just political. I haven't taken that step but really sympathize with those that do. Forwarding mail to Gmail accounts is perilous. My outbound queue is constantly full of mail to an established Gmail account that Google is throttling for some reason or another. I finally parted ways with a user over this specifically, since they had a number of mail accounts that were all forwarded to their Gmail account. For a company with so many smart employees, their handling on this is really dumb. Receiving mail from Gmail accounts isn't much better. Spammers have discovered that they can cheaply spin up new Gmail accounts and spam the world for a good while before Google detects it. Since so many people use Gmail, on the receiving side I can't use any of the network reputation tricks to catch the spam. So, these days, an appreciable percentage of the spam landing in my users' mail accounts is coming from Google. If it were just me, I'm pretty sure I'd just block anything to or from Gmail altogether and have one less recurring headache. ...which is really a shame, because I remember the excitement and wonder when Gmail debuted and how amazing it was at the time.
• cramforce 8y ago
  One important clarification since the question comes up often. AMP for email doesn't make emails inherently mutable. Emails already support updating by including external image references inside the email. Allowing this is a choice of the client. AMP for email makes JSON requests proxied by the email client. Your client can decide to only make these requests once and then keep them stable or to show you a version history of the state of your email upon every time you opened it.
  • pfortuny 8y ago
    What? My email client has to connect according to what a message says? That is crazy, man. NB: Not blaming you, just shocked.
    • cramforce 8y ago
      Nah, it would typically include all info known at send time, but it can see if there is updated data on email open time. E.g. when you open a notification email from GitHub, the email can tell you that since it was sent, there are now additional comments to consider.
      • pfortuny 8y ago
        Ok, but a sufficiently bad constructed message woul force me to do something to retrieve interesting “actual” content? That is what seems wrong.
        • cramforce 8y ago
          That email would probably otherwise just contain a link. It really doesn't make a difference. Clients can (and do) use trust scoring to activate AMP in emails. Right now they use the same model that would allow loading images by default.
        • deleted 8y ago
          [deleted]
    • 8y ago
• JohnFen 8y ago
  God help us all.
  • halfjoking 8y ago
    Jesus Christ, it's Google's AMP! AMP is the Jason Bourne of the web developer world... it could be the end of us all.
• jraph 8y ago
  It probably enables nice use cases but I hope it does not spread too much. Major features an email have: - it does not change (except for external resources, which are blocked by default anyway), - works offline, - can be read in ten years just fine. I want my mails to remain static and available and I don't think I'm okay with them running some uncontrolled code.
• wazoox 8y ago
  I'll still use only plain-text, GPG-signed email.
• altmind 8y ago
  I hope nobody will be mislead of the reasons google released AMP and AMP for email. It have nothing to do with performance(for AMP) or interactivity(amp4email) and more with establishing a vendor wallgarden. The standard is "open like in openxml" - there's a technical commitee, but your input will not be heard.
  • fstanis 8y ago
    > there's a technical commitee, but your input will not be heard. What makes you think input won't be heard?
    • barneygale 8y ago
      ^ Note that this is a google employee
    • frenchy 8y ago
      Like OOXML, it's probably mostly the case to woo government to use their proprietary format. Additionally, I think with AMP, you might be able to get your input heard, but only if you run a mail service with millions of users.
    • kevingadd 8y ago
      When have your web people ever listened to input? Not Web Audio, not 'autoplay' banning, not AMP, not NPAPI, that's for sure. I was on the Chrome team and your leadership still told me to pound sand. Your leadership deserve nothing but contempt.
    • userbinator 8y ago
      It'll be heard, but no one will care. Everyone who disagrees with their direction just gets ignored, because they know you're powerless to do anything to them.
    • chrisdone 8y ago
      It's Google. The only company that hears everything you say and listens to none of it.
• driverdan 8y ago
  Do any of the providers that support this atrocity have a setting to turn it off?
• altmind 8y ago
  There may be some technical grievances with the standard too. https://postmaster.mail.ru/amp/playground.html https://postmaster.mail.ru/amp/playground.html How they forget there's <style media="..."> and came up with this html non-conformant markup? `<style amp4email-boilerplate>body{visibility:hidden}</style>` New templating standard directly in html? They decided not to use DOM or components but just text, damaging the ability to transform the page in runtime and requiring backend processing? ` {{#cart_items}} {{/cart_items}} {{^cart_items}} {{/cart_items}} ` And amp4email starts with `<html 4email>`, with the emoji? seriously? [I cannot even insert this emoji here at HN] And regarding the tools... AMP-viewer... Can you actually check if there is anything implemented? i'm perplexed with https://github.com/ampproject/amp-viewer/tree/master/mobile-web https://github.com/ampproject/amp-viewer/tree/master/mobile-... - its only 4 source files with no logic inside, last commit 6 months ago... and all its supposedly do is generate iframe with mangled url pointing to amp-project website "https://www-ampproject-org.cdn.ampproject.org/v/s/www.ampproject.org/?amp_js_v=0.1#origin=http%3A%2F%2Flocalhost%3A8000" https://www-ampproject-org.cdn.ampproject.org/v/s/www.amppro... ? So all the AMP processing is walled out in a propietary service? And the other amp-viewer mentioned at https://www.ampproject.org/docs/integration/integrate-amphtml-email https://www.ampproject.org/docs/integration/integrate-amphtm... redirects to google corp portal? https://g3doc.corp.google.com/java/com/google/gws/plugins/amp/g3doc/index.md?cl=head https://g3doc.corp.google.com/java/com/google/gws/plugins/am...
  • bitpush 8y ago
    > And regarding the tools... AMP-viewer AMP documents display on its own. No need for AMP Viewer. (Example - https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/us/live-news/jussie-smollett-charges/index.html https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/us/live-news/jussie-smollett-charges...)
    • altmind 8y ago
      I see that https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.cnn.com/cnn/2019/03/26/entertainment/jussie-smollett-charges-dropped/index.html https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.cnn.com/cnn/2019/03/26/ente... redirects desktop browser to https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/us/live-news/jussie-smollett-charges/index.html https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/us/live-news/jussie-smollett-charges... even with user agent spoofing. I'm not getting here the content that a mobile user will get.
• rubyn00bie 8y ago
  This feels like a gigantic separation of concerns violation. Why the hell should amp have anything to do with email? What are the advantages over just normal markup besides proprietary features each vendor shovels on-top of the "open" standard? ... sigh AMP is the one thing I really, really, despise from Google and it just continues to spread.
  • fixermark 8y ago
    It looks like they're leveraging the safety aspect of AMP here. IIUC, the subset of HTML behavior AMP enables is generally considered to be "safe." If that property can hold, AMP-enabled email can allow for the benefits of live HTML in the client without the drawbacks of the surprises that can occur from arbitrary HTML execution.
    • fauigerzigerk 8y ago
      Does AMP not allow JavaScript?
      • fixermark 8y ago
        AMP gates the JavaScript it allows and requires asynchronous evaluation. 3rd party JS is also allowed, but it has to be in a sandboxed iframe which, in a browser at least, would guard some of the user's state from exfiltration attacks (it's unclear to me if the iframe feature is available in email AMP). https://www.ampproject.org/learn/about-how/ https://www.ampproject.org/learn/about-how/
        • fstanis 8y ago
          Emails only support a subset of AMP, so iframes and any form of JavaScript (other than the whitelisted AMP components) are not allowed.
    • deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
    • 8y ago
• megous 8y ago
  What was so bad about just following links from an e-mail to a website? Looks like this will be quite a boon to scammers. I wonder what creative uses they'll come up with. There are some ingrained expectations in people when it comes to e-mail that will now be violated, so there's a great opportunity to abuse this.
  • ocdtrekkie 8y ago
    As difficult as it's been to get people to look for the correct URL in the address bar of a browser, a good number of people are (relatively) aware of basic steps to ensure they are not being phished. Not clicking on links in emails, and going to the sites directly is a common strategy. By default, most email clients hide the header information needed to determine whether or not an email came from the address it claims to, including Gmail. I suspect we're going to see a lot of phishing emails that ask you to input sensitive data right into your email.
• samcday 8y ago
  Oh boy, can’t wait to see how this fractures the email landscape when Google inevitably abandons it 3-5 years from now. </snark>
  • JohnFen 8y ago
    AMP email itself will fracture the email landscape anyway.
• ilikehurdles 8y ago
  Great! Now I get the web interface I thoroughly despise viewing on my phone browser delivered directly to my mail client! Puke. I have been strongly considering migrating off of G Suite for my domains, files, and emails. Maybe it’s time I bite the bullet rather than keep using a product I have to actively fight to use.
  • 14 8y ago
    I too have considered leaving gmail for good. It seems like a bit of a process which I don't really know how to go about it and where to turn to but would love to do.
    • ocdtrekkie 8y ago
      First and foremost, I recommend everyone own their email address. That means getting a domain name. I switched from using a gmail.com address to an address at my own domain (I use inbox at mydomainname.com as my main address) over a period of about a year and a half, where my new email address was forwarded to Gmail, but I regularly updated various accounts to use my new address. Then, when I changed the redirect to point to a new service (FastMail), most of my email came with immediately. There's some secondary advantages to this. Not only can you switch providers at the drop of a hat, but you can control your address even if you get banned or blocked by the email provider. If you have, say, a gmail.com address, and your Gmail account gets terminated, you may lose access to all of your other accounts across the Internet as well, since you won't be able to access the email they're connected to. But if you own the domain, and it's forwarded to gmail.com, you can redirect the domain to another email provider, and send a new reset email to regain access to your other accounts.
      • systemspeed 8y ago
        This seems like a really good idea. Do you have any suggestions for a hosted email client similar to Gmail as well?
        • ocdtrekkie 8y ago
• tobr 8y ago
  There’s a simple thing Google could do to convince me that their intentions with AMP are honorable: make it possible to turn it off. EDIT, to be clear: for Google search results.
  • JoeSmithson 8y ago
    Perhaps I'm misunderstanding something but how can a standard be turned on and off? Can't you just not implement it? Or do you mean Google Search shouldn't show AMP pages?
    • mbel 8y ago
      I assume he means turning off AMP-related features in Google products. Like disabling Google search from opening AMP pages instead of actual sites.
    • MithrilTuxedo 8y ago
      When I swipe right on my Pixel 2 to get to the Google Now news feed, any article I click on opens the AMP version. It's great when I'm on the light rail going through areas with patchy cell signal, but when an article's share buttons are broken because it's the AMP version it's a pain to figure out how to navigate to the non-AMP version of the article. A couple news sources (usually technical ones) thankfully put a link to the non-AMP version somewhere on the page, but IMHO this should be automatically done for every AMP link opened.
      • microcolonel 8y ago
        > A couple news sources (usually technical ones) thankfully put a link to the non-AMP version somewhere on the page, but IMHO this should be automatically done for every AMP link opened. That is available in the standard markup, so it should maybe just be added to the UI (in the ellipsis menu probably).
    • tobr 8y ago
      Yes, I want to turn it off as a user of Google search.
• umvi 8y ago
  Email needs to be even simpler than it currently is, not more complex. These AMP emails sound like a they are going to be a huge headache. "RSVP straight from the email!!" Yeah, and when that doesn't work am I stuck?
  • andrei_says_ 8y ago
    Yes, RSVP directly from the email I forwarded you :)
• deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
• chuckgreenman 8y ago
  Being able to respond to a doodle pool directly from an email is awesome! But the number of those use cases will be dwarfed by marketing companies that abuse these feature to track people even more.
• jesusthatsgreat 8y ago
  Ok gang, let's see who's behind this... takes off the mask to reveal Google Buzz
• verytrivial 8y ago
  I have a well developed curmudgeonly streak I confess, but the first AMP email I receive from any person or organisation will be the last I open from them.
• cproctor 8y ago
  I started transitioning away from Gmail (to Fastmail) last fall, forwarding my gmail and using a signature asking people to update their address book. This is a good day to make the hard cutoff. One strategy for explaining the problem to non-technical people is by comparing regular email to the walled-garden email used by some banks, phone companies, and the like--where you have to log into their website to see your 'inbox' and use a web form to send messages. It's super annoying and the other party has complete control of the communication channel. "Dynamic email" could be implemented to inject this kludge into your email client, giving the AMP sender (who likely has more power than the user) the same level of control over the channel. Imagine opening your email client and finding a message which asks for two security questions and a captcha, then lands you in a messaging interface which limits you to 200 characters and denies basic affordances of email like archiving and forwarding. I find the arguments that email is already mutable because images are externally-loaded unpersuasive. In 2013 Google started caching images in gmail "to protect you from unknown senders who might try to use images to compromise the security of your computer." [1] Email marketers were upset at losing engagement metrics. Now a practice that used to be considered abuse is being rolled out as a feature. [1] https://gmail.googleblog.com/2013/12/images-now-showing.html https://gmail.googleblog.com/2013/12/images-now-showing.html
  • cproctor 8y ago
    btw, my email to Fastmail: After reading GMail's announcement about dynamic email and your position statement on AMP, I am thankful to have switched to FastMail and looking forward to remaining your customer. I'm writing to ask you not to implement AMP dynamic email. Even though you don't have a huge slice of the email market, your customers are probably disproportionately privileged and informed (they choose to pay for email...), which positions you to resist these erosions to privacy and democracy in ways that individuals can't. More pragmatically, I see your non-support of AMP as a big feature. If you don't support AMP, companies can't as easily put pressure on me to use a communication channel where they have all the control. Thanks!
    • ocdtrekkie 8y ago
      As a FastMail customer and strong AMP opposer, I do understand FastMail's position that they may support AMP for compatibility. It's the unfortunate nature of the beast that most people have Gmail, and emails are hence sent under the expectation that the end user probably has Gmail. FastMail would be shooting itself in the foot to not implement AMP for Email if it becomes popular, because people expect their email service to work with the emails everyone else is sending. However, if FastMail does add AMP for Email support, I expect them to do much more to ensure I can see the historical record of AMP data, and for them to take significant measures to ensure that user privacy is protected. And of course, that we can just shut it off.
• ProAm 8y ago
  Google tries really hard to get me to leave. Gmail is already unusable on the web. Google Calendar now has background images to events I cant turn off. GCM doesnt notify me when I get emails on android unless I wake the phone. I really dont want to go to Apple but what's keeping me using anything Google beyond search?
  • TeMPOraL 8y ago
    I find Stylus extension to be a great way to unbreak the sites you regularly use. More and more, I find myself making ad-hoc userscripts to remove bullshit sites large and small send my way, and to fix the annoying trend of making everything uselessly large and full of whitespace.
  • asark 8y ago
    > Gmail is already unusable on the web. The Basic HTML version is the best and snappiest version, by far. Still exists. Even on Google's own Fiber service I have plenty of time when trying to load any other version to click the "slow? try basic HTML" link in the bottom right, and then you can set it as your default. I'll be leaving anyway with this Amp crap, but there's still work email. Basic HTML is the way to go.
• warp 8y ago
  I'd be more supportive of this if it standardized (and mandated) unsubscribe links. Email would be less of a hassle if I could just unsubscribe from many things in a standardized way within the email client itself.
  • jimktrains2 8y ago
    That already exists: `List-Unsubscribe` since 1998,RFC 2369.
    • yjftsjthsd-h 8y ago
      Making it mandatory would help.
• knowsmorsecode 8y ago
  Let this fail like google+ is all I have to say.
  • ldng 8y ago
    Make it fail. I'm going to flag as SPAM any mail that comes with AMP in it.
    • ganeshkrishnan 8y ago
      Until google bans your account and everything holy related to it for "click fraud"
      • justtopost 8y ago
        Ill take that risk.
  • arendtio 8y ago
    Sadly, I doubt that it will fail. I don't know anybody who actually likes AMP and yet it didn't die in the past years. So probably the person who is in charge of AMP is just very good at marketing his baby inside Google.
• tschellenbach 8y ago
  well say goodbye to the idea of email being a distributed protocol. centralization for the win
• OnlyRepliesToBS 8y ago
  pls stop
• josteink 8y ago
  Google’s hostile attempt at taking over internet email is finally here. There can be no doubt what they want now, and that Gmail as a platform is harmful to the internet at large. If you haven’t already, migrate today. There’s plenty of good options out there.
• alkonaut 8y ago
  So presumably I can assume any email using amp is a campaign and just move it straight out of my inbox?
• s17n 8y ago
  Email is actively dying and being replaced by closed alternatives (Messenger, Slack, etc) and any effort by any company to keep it alive should be applauded, including this one. That being said I can't imagine a scenario where AMP in email is anything but annoying.
  • jakeogh 8y ago
    "keep it alive" Google's record is one of infect and close. It might seem unrelated, but disabling JS is the real fix.
  • sergiosgc 8y ago
    Instant messaging and email serve different use cases. Synchronous and ephemeral vs asynchronous and permanent.
  • paganel 8y ago
    I still can find emails in my mailbox that I've sent or received 10 or 15 years ago while on the other hand I have pretty big issues with finding the exact message I sent on FB Messenger only a day ago (it involves lots of scrolling), never mind a couple of years (Skype presents the the same issue for me). I guess Slack behaves the same way as FB Messenger (I haven't personally used it).
    • s17n 8y ago
      Yes, this is why we need to support email. You can list its advantages all day long but if people don't check their email (or don't even have an email account), then it will be useless and that's the direction we're headed.
      • JohnFen 8y ago
        I don't agree that's the direction we're headed. But if it is, and if something like AMP is what's needed to "save" it, that result is the same as it being dead for me, personally.
  • romwell 8y ago
• Rebelgecko 8y ago
  I'm assuming that Google killed the Inbox app died because they didn't want to implement this? Ugh.
• atonse 8y ago
  I have hated AMP for the web with a passion. The other day I did a google search, started reading an article, and all of a sudden, I saw a little floating alert at the bottom saying "signed in to google" and I was quite alarmed by it, as I hadn't realized I had clicked on an AMP link. So an article that had nothing to do with google, kept me on a google property, and caused me to log in to google. So now I'm associated with that article. These companies desperately need to be chopped up and have severe data sharing restrictions put on them. They're much more invasive than Microsoft ever was in the 90s.
  • benmarks 8y ago
    Would you not be "associated with that article" regardless? You clicked the link, and that action is a tracked conversion regardless of destination.
    • Marsymars 8y ago
      I don't want my link-clicking actions to be tracked.
      • brian_cloutier 8y ago
        That's going to be very hard to fix. In order for your link-click to be resolved your computer has to send some packets and tell somebody that you want a piece of content. Somebody has to give you that content. Unless you're using tor (really, even if you're using tor), these are actions with physical manifestations which can be tracked.
        • Marsymars 8y ago
          Right, I mean, I'm fine with Example co knowing that I opened example.com/somepage. I don't want a search engine to know whether I navigated there from a search result, and I don't want Example co to know where I navigated from or whether I typed the URL manually into my browser.
• felixfbecker 8y ago
  Can anyone explain to me why HTML inside email is not working for these use cases, and why we need a new standard if HTML powers these things on the web?
  • mrcarruthers 8y ago
    Because HTML in emails is a notoriously painful process to get working even remotely well. Not all email providers support HTML in the same way. Some examples: * At one point Gmail did not support style tags and all styles had to be inline. * Outlook for years used the Word HTML processor which had all sorts of limitations. Hell to get a button you had to create it in VML and put a conditional "if Microsoft do this" on it. * Some (up until a few years ago) versions of Outlook ignore either padding/margin on CSS (forget which one) * In order to layout your email so that it works across all clients, forget about using anything remotely modern. You have to use tables everywhere like it's 2000 all over again. I'm probably forgetting a bunch, it's been a couple years since I had to deal with it. With all these issues, adding yet another thing onto it is just asking for pain.
    • ganeshkrishnan 8y ago
      >Not all email providers support HTML in the same way. Excellent. Let's introduce one more standard.
      • taormina 8y ago
        https://xkcd.com/927/ https://xkcd.com/927/
      • kkarakk 8y ago
        yes BUT like it or not this standard has the backing of the defacto ruler of the consumer email space - gmail.
    • JohnFen 8y ago
      > HTML in emails is a notoriously painful process to get working even remotely well. That's a feature, not a bug. If it discourages people from using HTML in emails even a little, that's a good thing.
• deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
• jacquesm 8y ago
  The last thing I need is for my email to become more like the web. I want my email to become even less like the web.
• 908087 8y ago
  Yet another thing nobody asked for being "cramforced" down our throats by Google.
• thsowers 8y ago
  The last thing I need in Google's already unusable web interface is a "more dynamic" experience. Ever since the Gmail "update", it regularly takes me 45+ seconds on a 60MBps connection to just _load_ my inbox.
  • ClassyJacket 8y ago
    Not quite 45, but still 15 second for me on gigabit fibre on an i7 machine with 16GB RAM. Pathetic.
  • qnsi 8y ago
    I wonder why this happens? Both gmail and Google drive loads so slow for me. They cant make this right?
    • favadi 8y ago
      I don't know why, but Gmail and Google Drive loads significantly faster on Chrome compare to Firefox.
• Zenst 8y ago
  I find the level of hate for AMP to be about on par with the hate for Comic Sans circa 2005. It's at the stage that you meet people who love to hate it without even knowing why that hate it, that it is almost fashionable to hate it. Then those that do have a reason to hate it, always have their own reason. With no consensus reason for hating it. Though I'm noticing an increase of "Google" being the reason they give. But then people love to hate, back when IBM was top dog - people loved to hate them, then Microsoft, and today, well today Google seems to get more hate than Microsoft these days. That's not saying Google did anything wrong, or Microsoft did anything right. If anything, people love to hate whoever is sitting at the top and today in the public's eye - that's Google. Not saying they are right, or wrong. But clearly - the people's level of hate does seem to correlate with any large company attaining a overly dominant position. Just kinda fascinating to see the same patterns play out over time.
  • JohnFen 8y ago
    > It's at the stage that you meet people who love to hate it without even knowing why that hate it I don't love to hate it. I just hate it, and I can tell you why -- it's a one-two punch of AMP pages being generally inferior to the real pages, and Google interposing itself between me and the website.
    • Zenst 8y ago
      I think you've nailed it - people hate having choices removed from them.
  • mgpc 8y ago
    I recognize what you're saying is partly true, but I still have an almost irrational burning hatred for AMP.
    • Zenst 8y ago
      In younger days I'd of questioned you to the nth degree to rationalise it all. But with age, I've learned that it's cool to just not like something - after all, we happily accept such personal choices when it comes to food. So why not with some arbitrary software more suited as an outlet for any negativity. Indeed, the World would be a far better place if they just focused their hate onto some bit of software. So with that said, I totally respect your irrational burning hatred for AMP.
• minimaul 8y ago
  At this point, I’m convinced google are actively harmful to the internet. Trying to centralise as much of the internet and how people interact with it under their control is dangerous and open to widespread abuse - and this is already happening. See: YouTube demonetisation YouTube content ID abuse Chrome extension changes Gmail is already completely broken on IMAP unless clients throw in google specific workarounds, and now they’re moving on to break the next layer of email too. Joy.
  • minimaul 8y ago
    Further to this... at this point, Google controls: - the largest browser people use to view pages (Chrome) - the largest platform people use to run that browser (Android) - the largest way people discover content online (Google Search) - the largest way people advertise online (Google Ads) - the largest way people share video online (YouTube) - the largest email provider (Gmail) This is way too much power over the internet in one corporate entity. It’s way beyond what MS ever accomplished at their height, and it’s way beyond anything Apple ever accomplished either. The power Google have over the internet at large and the content people consume at this point frankly terrifies me.
    • axaxs 8y ago
      Would you argue they should be broken up? Asking honestly, I don't really have a strong opinion. On one hand, I don't like the idea of punishing companies for their success. On the other, the barrier to entry has become too high for anyone to make a dent, giving them alone effective control over whether or not your company succeeds.
      • echelon 8y ago
        Yes! A million times yes. Google wields too much control and is forcing the evolution of technology to further their grasp. They reach into every sector of technology, and every play they make deepens their moat. Look at how fast they spin up new products to see if they can claw into a new space. They move mountains if they sense they can grapple something new, and if it doesn't work out they tear it down without considering the users. It isn't about the individual - they want total control. Google is 90's Microsoft's Embrace/Extend/Extinguish executed to perfection. (See my thread from yesterday [1] where I argue these points as they pertain to the app store.) I'm going to talk with my local lawmakers. I don't know what leverage I have, but I'll be damned if I sit on the sidelines. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19488245 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19488245
• Alex3917 8y ago
  Which AMP components are actually supported? The spec isn't rendering correctly and none of the links seem to work.
  • fstanis 8y ago
    The full list of supported AMP components is here: https://amp.dev/documentation/guides-and-tutorials/learn/amp-email-format.html?format=email https://amp.dev/documentation/guides-and-tutorials/learn/amp...
• openbasic 8y ago
  OK, that's it. I'm not paying for this crap anymore. Which email providers do you guys recommend? Zoho? Rackspace?
  • eafkuor 8y ago
    Runbox is great, although I'm not an email power user.
• jwr 8y ago
  If you use Google's E-mail service (directly or through Google Apps), you no longer own your E-mail. It is the property of an advertising company that will do with it whatever it sees fit, including reading it, learning from it, modifying it and hiding some of it from you. This needs to be explained to people, as most still think that Gmail just displays all of your private E-mail with a nice interface, FOR FREE! The "FOR FREE" part is really the killer, I found that people are amazingly resistant to the idea of paying anything for E-mail, even if compared to their other utilities (power, water, internet, TV?) it is extremely cheap.
  • fstanis 8y ago
    Ads in Gmail are not related to your emails: https://support.google.com/mail/answer/6603 https://support.google.com/mail/answer/6603
    • rurp 8y ago
      At the moment they aren't, but they used to be and very well could be again in the future. Also, that link says nothing about Google not "reading it, learning from it, modifying it and hiding some of it from you", when it comes to your emails, which is GPs stated concern. Google still saves and parses every email it gets and likely uses that data for a number of purposes. No longer directly targeting Gmail ads with it really doesn't do much for people who are concerned about Google and privacy issues.
      • joshuamorton 8y ago
        >Google still saves and parses every email it gets and likely uses that data for a number of purposes. Sure, but so does literally every email provider. Storing your email and spam classification are pretty much the two biggest features an email provider can provide. This is like objections to "algorithms" or "chemicals".
• Havoc 8y ago
  Ah the latest totally definitely not evil move.
• deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
• mgarfias 8y ago
  this sounds like consilient from the dotcom daze. wow that was a long ass time ago.
• runxel 8y ago
  Maybe I got old already, but this looks like a horrible idea.
• CodeSheikh 8y ago
  AMP for email is indeed a terrible idea. Google made Gmail extremely slow with latest facelift. The only reason I can see if for Google et al to show ads (impressions vs clicks).
• newnewpdro 8y ago
  If you work for an Alphabet company please quit.
• paulcarroty 8y ago
  Google trying to present whole internet as part of their services: Chrome browser as gateway, then search (which also aggressive promote Chrome) and Youtube/Blogger/Maps/News/etc.
• rcchyssser 8y ago
  Goo Google! Amp site are the best! Can't wait to use amp email.
• kevin_thibedeau 8y ago
  What prevents a sender from changing the content of an email? If none, the legal ramifications would be scary.
• supernintendo 8y ago
  Getting a template to render probably across all clients (assuming you’re working with more than just text) is already a rat king of client implementations, HTML specs etc. Some versions of Outlook, for example, use the MS Word rendering engine which forces you to rely on a pattern of inline comment conditionals to even get markup and styling to not break the entire message. Mobile email clients add another dimension of concerns. Worst of all, you can’t undo or fix emails that are already in the wild so the consequence of errors can sometimes be catastrophic (broken unsub links, incorrect ESP merge variables, etc.) That said, the problem is not email. Email is just fine. The problem is people using email to solve problems that email was not designed to solve, namely marketing. With this move, Google is adding a considerable amount of fuel to the fire. Can’t say that I’m a fan of this, as cool as the features may sound on a surface level.
• desireco42 8y ago
  Email should be plain text, anything else is overkill. :)
• mastazi 8y ago
  “email has largely stayed the same with static messages that eventually go out of date” It’s amazing how reality is completely the opposite of what they are saying. I can still read a text email sent in 1999. No way an interactive AMP email will still work in 20 years.
• m3kw9 8y ago
  Google is really purposefully trying to piss people off
• Fice 8y ago
  Email is the last massively used open and independent communication system on the Internet. Unfortunately, many irresponsible users allowed Google to monopolize it by flocking to Gmail, and now Google is taking advantage of their position.
• rad_gruchalski 8y ago
  Wow, I’m already looking forward to more flashy, blinking, nagging, unsolicited spam from booking.com in my mailbox. Thanks Google!
• suddenexample 8y ago
  Hmmmm. As long as this is restricted to very simple functionality, it seems fine to me. What I don't want is my emails taking 3 seconds to load because some random AMP component I don't need has to load. Also I think they are aware about the static permanence issue... Hope they have a good solution to that.
• SimeVidas 8y ago
  ELI5 Why is this bad?
• rocky1138 8y ago
  Looking into switching to Fastmail. Google hasn't been friendly for years and it's finally time. Before I pull the trigger, anyone have a better service than Fastmail to recommend?
  • smush 8y ago
    No it pretty much just works.
• deepnotderp 8y ago
  Whelp, time to finally migrate to Startmail or Protonmail...
• zimmund 8y ago
  This reminds me a lot of Google Wave. While I have my concerns about a format brought by Google (who may be defining a bit too much of the web these days), adding richness to emails will be refreshing. As long as we keep the idea that a message is something that will not change and be accessible as long as we can access our inbox, I'm all in for improvements. I just hope it evolves into something beyond Google's control.
• kerng 8y ago
  Does anyone really need this? Email is already a prime security threat and attack angle- now you can get phished from within the mail app. Awesome!
• gojomo 8y ago
  Anyone remember FireDrop/Zaplets? https://www.forbes.com/forbes/2000/0612/6514218a.html#58b1f30c57dc https://www.forbes.com/forbes/2000/0612/6514218a.html#58b1f3... Interactive emails, powered by HTML/Javascript, in 2000! What could possibly go wrong?
• DeepYogurt 8y ago
  If you're using gmail personally it's time to up sticks.
• abhishekgargg 8y ago
  really nice
• balls187 8y ago
  Why?
• Urgo 8y ago
  So.. google wave is back? AMP: https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/Dynamic-Mail_Docs.gif https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/Dynamic-Ma... Wave: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xBzuuWZPaXc&feature=youtu.be&t=25 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xBzuuWZPaXc&feature=youtu.be...
• brian_cloutier 8y ago
  As best I can tell there's no way for individuals to send amp emails. In order for gmail to accept an amp email it's sender must first register [1]. Registration comes with a couple requirements, one of which is a "Consistent history of sending a high volume of mail from your domain (order of hundred emails a day minimum to Gmail) for a few weeks at least." This is so contrary to how anything else on the web works that I feel I must have missed something. Their "standard" is not available to individual developers. Only those who are already sending lots of mail may play. This is far worse than how web sites have slowly become more opaque so that it's now harder to learn how to develop them. It's simply not possible to play around with this new medium. The open web is no more. [1]: https://developers.google.com/gmail/ampemail/register https://developers.google.com/gmail/ampemail/register
  • JohnFen 8y ago
    > As best I can tell there's no way for individuals to send amp emails. If this is true, then I celebrate it! It means that I can have my mailserver simply discard all AMP emails and be confident that I'm not missing anything aside from spam.
  • JohnFen 8y ago
    > As best I can tell there's no way for individuals to send amp emails I researched this a bit. Here's the scoop: right now, GMail is trialling AMP emails and are limiting that trial to entities that send out lots of emails. Post-trial, the intention is to allow anyone to send AMP emails. However, other major email services that have hopped onto this bandwagon are not limiting the use of AMP emails this way. So it's not true that there's no way for individuals to send AMP emails. It's true for GMail specifically, but even there, that's a temporary limitation.
    • brian_cloutier 8y ago
      nice, thanks for doing this research! Do you have anything I could read which says they'll open this up?
      • 8y ago
• llbowers 8y ago
  Maybe I'm just in the HN bubble, but it seems AMP is pretty unpopular. I've found numerous requests online asking how to disable it from others, though again, only anecdotal. Is it unpopular? Or are most users ambivalent? And if it is unpopular why does Google continually try and push it? Edit: grammatical mistakes
  • kkarakk 8y ago
    most users only care about speed, amp gives them that speed. voila, they keep using google - "coz it's fast".
• jasonhansel 8y ago
  I've switched to Fastmail and DuckDuckGo away from Google services. Definitely the right choice.
• stratigos 8y ago
  > ...get their work done faster precisely :) work! work! work! work! work! work...
• riffraff 8y ago
  I'll predict it here first: European Commission will be fining google about this in 10 years.
• begriffs 8y ago
  > The promise of AMP for Email is that it’ll turn basic messages into a surface for actually getting things done. Oh god no, please don't turn email into a "surface." > That means you’ll be able to do [x, y, z] right from the message, all without leaving your web-based email client. Quit. Gmail. Why are so many technical users still on this gross platform that is turning the earliest, most successful decentralized internet protocol into a walled surveillance advertiser garden? If you use gmail, go register a domain and point your MX records at an honest mail provider like Fastmail, Posteo, or Kolabnow. Or run your own mail server. This way your mail provider is hidden behind your domain and you can change it in the future if desired. Seriously, stop reading hacker news for a second and make today the day you start migrating away from Google.
  • auslander 8y ago
    > If you use gmail, go register a domain and point your MX Simpler. Use outlook.com or icloud.com or tens of other email providers that are not an advertising company.
• auslander 8y ago
  What the Inventor Of Email Has to say about this? I hope he'll sue Google, let him know. https://vashiva.com https://vashiva.com
• t0astbread 8y ago
  Someone should start a movement for open-standards compliant interactive email using CSS hacks
  • nfoz 8y ago
    I'd rather we just don't have "interactive email".
    • t0astbread 8y ago
      Google's gonna jump on it no matter if we like it or not. And if Google jumps on it and succeeds to make it popular all businesses will jump on it. And before you know it, Google owns HTML email (which will then be all AMP). I understand your concerns but think about it: In 5 years time would you rather have emails that are as broken as today's web pages or emails that are as broken as today's web pages AND controlled by Google?
• auslander 8y ago
  I don't think subj will be adopted for normal correspondence. It will be used only for marketing emails. I will not be spending time encoding AMP to write to somebody.
• Pamar 8y ago
  Haven't read the full article yet, but I'd like to note that ~20 years ago a now-defunct company tried to put to market something similar. The product name was, IMS, "Zaplets": the idea was to have html mails with Java applets embedded, so you could for example send an email with a "poll Zaplet" that would work more or less like a Doodle poll - restricted to the email receivers. And if you were one of them, you could periodically open the original email again and see the dynamic zaplet content with all the changes that had been applied in the meantime. (I used these a bit to coordinate small stuff in a project I was working on, mostly for the novelty value). The company was soon acquired by some other bigger company, and the Zaplet concept was shelved for good. See: https://www.zdnet.com/article/a-new-kind-of-email/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/a-new-kind-of-email/
• thybag 8y ago
  I'm always disappointed there is no standard for just sending markdown emails. They work fine as plain text, are future proof & any can easily be styled up an email client to fit with the rest of its design. Always a shame to have to go full HTML email, just for some light formatting.