10 ms·

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/buil

by 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.
        Aeolun 8y ago
        But still better than anything else that could reasonably be achieved. Tables are pretty much the only cross-platform/client way to format email.
      - Zenst 8y ago
        Technically email is plaintext, though for the definition you aspire towards, it was in the early days. But then various RFC's added this and that and now email processing/sanitisation is scary. But then email is one large unsanitized input that has so many rules to be applied, what could go wrong. That's why email attachments alone are an utter MIME-field when it comes to security.
  - Bartweiss 8y ago
    > sit around in the gutter while the rest of the web gets more multimedia and more performant I (sincerely) appreciate reminders like this of just how much online opinions and experiences vary. My sense of the last few years of web changes is that performance is mostly a product of script-blocking or AMP-degraded functionality, and new multimedia is mostly a user-hostile attempt to boost revenue. Whether it's five-point stories broken across five page loads, Reddit's "use our app" links breaking in AMP, or Techcrunch's insane scroll-down-to-redirect-to-homepage layout, the last ~3 years of web development are full of changes I find actively negative. I understand the fight over something like AMP for email much better when I remember how far from universal that is. It's not really a surprise there's so much disagreement over what to do next when there's this much divide over what's working well at present.
    - danudey 8y ago
      AMP seems less like a response to 'the web is slow' and more a response to 'people who are tired of slow websites are using content blockers so we need an alternative so they don't block our ads'.
      - lern_too_spel 8y ago
        It's a solution to the web is not instant, which closed proprietary competing solutions like Facebook Instant Articles and Apple News solve.
  - UI_at_80x24 8y ago
    >gets more multimedia and more performant More performant then text? What are you comparing it to smoke signals FFS? And let me see if I understand you correctly, you _WANT_ multimedia in your emails? What is the point? To send miniature versions of web-pages?!?
    - fixermark 8y ago
      Yes. The advantages of HTML in an email are well-documented in the TC article and the Google announcement. I would make use of that, personally.
      - JohnFen 8y ago
        Those "advantages" are very weak, at best.
      - UI_at_80x24 8y ago
        None of those "Advantages" were advantageous to the end user. This only benefits Google or other corporations, and anything that benefits them harms me.
        fixermark 8y ago
        With respect, "anything that benefits corporations harms me" is a weird attitude. AMP in email could, hypothetically, allow me to hit the "checkin to my flight" button for a Southwest flight directly from my confirmation email without having to bump over to their website. That's cool, convenient, and simplifies my life. It also benefits the corporation (their resource allocation is easier if they have a firm count of flyers) and it benefits Google (I'm more likely to use an email client that facilitates this). The business world is full of win-wins, and this has the potential to be one of them.
        gwenzek 8y ago
        > checkin to my flight button You can do that in HTML email too. Newsletter have an "unsubscribe" button, calendar invites have a yes/no/maybe button.
  - JohnFen 8y ago
    > There's no particular reason email needs to sit around in the gutter while the rest of the web gets more In my view, that's not "email sitting around in the gutter", that's "email retaining things that make it valuable". Also, email is not, and should not be, the web -- so "the rest of the web" is a bit of a nonsequitor.
    - baroffoos 8y ago
      Email has in some ways sat around in the gutter but media reasons are not why. The protocols are insanely complex and archaic and you need about 20 bits of software to actually run an email server. And then its all completely insecure because email was never built with end to end crypto. imap is so insane that every email provider reinvented it to have a sane api for their web client and app. Fastmail also created JMAP to have a standard json api for email.
  - AlexandrB 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. "The rest of the web" is the ad-laden, tracker-infested, bloated gutter of the internet. Email is (was?) a little morsel of the old open internet (along with RSS/podcasts) that has not yet drowned in the morass.
  - baroffoos 8y ago
    How could email possibly be more performant? Its just a few blocks of text. I click on the email and it loads instantly because its already downloaded.
    - hedora 8y ago
      I think you’re looking at performance all wrong. How long until the sender’s ad targeting subcontractors know you read it? How long until they can act on that information to manipulate you into sending cash, voting to sabotage the government, or otherwise act against your own interests? With static email, all of these latencies are in the days, or at least hours. With amp email, it can be accomplished in 100’s of milliseconds.
  - Mirioron 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. No technology has angered me more in the last few years than AMP. I have literally switched my main search engine just so I don't have to deal with AMP. At no point have I ever appreciated AMP. It has only been a disadvantage.
  - kerng 8y ago
    Google's mail and calendar experience is already horrible and confusing. This is gonna just make it worse.
  - venj 8y ago
    The only thing that needs to be more performant in my email experience is the gmail UI.
- cjhopman 8y ago
  > and continued forward with a program that nobody wants Don't presume to speak so for others.
  - jakubp 8y ago
    It's an obvious generalization. Everybody else gets what he meant, don't you?
    - craftinator 8y ago
      Seems the majority gets it.
- wan23 8y ago
  Google doesn't have a monopoly on email. Check your (personal) inbox - I'd bet the majority of emails on the first page are not from Gmail users but rather from various companies and organizations. Even among individuals, while many people get their email from Google, the most popular client (which is what's relevant in this case) is the mail app on the iPhone. Microsoft and Yahoo still have decent market share as well, though much less than I thought before I started writing this with 12-18% between them according to my not-super-rigorous Google search.
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.

by 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.
      - Aeolun 8y ago
        But still better than anything else that could reasonably be achieved. Tables are pretty much the only cross-platform/client way to format email.
    - Zenst 8y ago
      Technically email is plaintext, though for the definition you aspire towards, it was in the early days. But then various RFC's added this and that and now email processing/sanitisation is scary. But then email is one large unsanitized input that has so many rules to be applied, what could go wrong. That's why email attachments alone are an utter MIME-field when it comes to security.
- Bartweiss 8y ago
  > sit around in the gutter while the rest of the web gets more multimedia and more performant I (sincerely) appreciate reminders like this of just how much online opinions and experiences vary. My sense of the last few years of web changes is that performance is mostly a product of script-blocking or AMP-degraded functionality, and new multimedia is mostly a user-hostile attempt to boost revenue. Whether it's five-point stories broken across five page loads, Reddit's "use our app" links breaking in AMP, or Techcrunch's insane scroll-down-to-redirect-to-homepage layout, the last ~3 years of web development are full of changes I find actively negative. I understand the fight over something like AMP for email much better when I remember how far from universal that is. It's not really a surprise there's so much disagreement over what to do next when there's this much divide over what's working well at present.
  - danudey 8y ago
    AMP seems less like a response to 'the web is slow' and more a response to 'people who are tired of slow websites are using content blockers so we need an alternative so they don't block our ads'.
    - lern_too_spel 8y ago
      It's a solution to the web is not instant, which closed proprietary competing solutions like Facebook Instant Articles and Apple News solve.
- UI_at_80x24 8y ago
  >gets more multimedia and more performant More performant then text? What are you comparing it to smoke signals FFS? And let me see if I understand you correctly, you _WANT_ multimedia in your emails? What is the point? To send miniature versions of web-pages?!?
  - fixermark 8y ago
    Yes. The advantages of HTML in an email are well-documented in the TC article and the Google announcement. I would make use of that, personally.
    - JohnFen 8y ago
      Those "advantages" are very weak, at best.
    - UI_at_80x24 8y ago
      None of those "Advantages" were advantageous to the end user. This only benefits Google or other corporations, and anything that benefits them harms me.
      - fixermark 8y ago
        With respect, "anything that benefits corporations harms me" is a weird attitude. AMP in email could, hypothetically, allow me to hit the "checkin to my flight" button for a Southwest flight directly from my confirmation email without having to bump over to their website. That's cool, convenient, and simplifies my life. It also benefits the corporation (their resource allocation is easier if they have a firm count of flyers) and it benefits Google (I'm more likely to use an email client that facilitates this). The business world is full of win-wins, and this has the potential to be one of them.
        gwenzek 8y ago
        > checkin to my flight button You can do that in HTML email too. Newsletter have an "unsubscribe" button, calendar invites have a yes/no/maybe button.
- JohnFen 8y ago
  > There's no particular reason email needs to sit around in the gutter while the rest of the web gets more In my view, that's not "email sitting around in the gutter", that's "email retaining things that make it valuable". Also, email is not, and should not be, the web -- so "the rest of the web" is a bit of a nonsequitor.
  - baroffoos 8y ago
    Email has in some ways sat around in the gutter but media reasons are not why. The protocols are insanely complex and archaic and you need about 20 bits of software to actually run an email server. And then its all completely insecure because email was never built with end to end crypto. imap is so insane that every email provider reinvented it to have a sane api for their web client and app. Fastmail also created JMAP to have a standard json api for email.
- AlexandrB 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. "The rest of the web" is the ad-laden, tracker-infested, bloated gutter of the internet. Email is (was?) a little morsel of the old open internet (along with RSS/podcasts) that has not yet drowned in the morass.
- baroffoos 8y ago
  How could email possibly be more performant? Its just a few blocks of text. I click on the email and it loads instantly because its already downloaded.
  - hedora 8y ago
    I think you’re looking at performance all wrong. How long until the sender’s ad targeting subcontractors know you read it? How long until they can act on that information to manipulate you into sending cash, voting to sabotage the government, or otherwise act against your own interests? With static email, all of these latencies are in the days, or at least hours. With amp email, it can be accomplished in 100’s of milliseconds.
- Mirioron 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. No technology has angered me more in the last few years than AMP. I have literally switched my main search engine just so I don't have to deal with AMP. At no point have I ever appreciated AMP. It has only been a disadvantage.
- kerng 8y ago
  Google's mail and calendar experience is already horrible and confusing. This is gonna just make it worse.
- venj 8y ago
  The only thing that needs to be more performant in my email experience is the gmail UI.
cjhopman 8y ago
> and continued forward with a program that nobody wants Don't presume to speak so for others.
- jakubp 8y ago
  It's an obvious generalization. Everybody else gets what he meant, don't you?
  - craftinator 8y ago
    Seems the majority gets it.
wan23 8y ago
Google doesn't have a monopoly on email. Check your (personal) inbox - I'd bet the majority of emails on the first page are not from Gmail users but rather from various companies and organizations. Even among individuals, while many people get their email from Google, the most popular client (which is what's relevant in this case) is the mail app on the iPhone. Microsoft and Yahoo still have decent market share as well, though much less than I thought before I started writing this with 12-18% between them according to my not-super-rigorous Google search.

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.