11 ms·

Gmail Dynamic Email (a.k.a. AMP for Email)

70 points by soheil 4y ago

57FkMytWjyFu 4y ago
was I the only one that read this like... oh, this is how we plan on getting past your carefully curated spam filter, by changing the email after it slides in?
- soheil 4y ago
  Clever but I wonder if the dynamic content also gets spam checked again in the context of original email and only displayed if it passes.
57FkMytWjyFu 4y ago
And here's how to disable it for a user, because the document suggests that it's only for administrators. https://www.howtogeek.com/427457/how-to-disable-dynamic-emails-in-gmail/ https://www.howtogeek.com/427457/how-to-disable-dynamic-emai...
janosdebugs 4y ago
This really sounds like a (security) accident waiting to happen, or the very least, building a walled garden system.
- agileAlligator 4y ago
  > This really sounds like a (security) accident waiting to happen That was my first thought. Just requires one vulnerability, and boom everyone who has a gmail account is at risk
ocdtrekkie 4y ago
This is one of those things everyone told the allegedly "open" AMP project was a very, very bad idea, and the AMP project lead basically told everyone Gmail was doing it whether people liked it or not, and then insinuated anyone who had an issue with it was violating the Code of Conduct.
- seanhunter 4y ago
  It’s quite astonishing to think how divorced from reality you must be to see how badly the whole AMP thing has gone and think “Yup AMP for gmail. That’s what we need.”
  - ushakov 4y ago
    they don’t care, they need a promotion
- dmitriid 4y ago
  Don't forget all questions about this were ignored, issues on GutHub were closed, and then the project lead wrote a self-congratulatory blog post on how the whole AMP process is open and transparent.
ftyhbhyjnjk 4y ago
Will this render emails as source of truth in legal cases useless?
- password4321 4y ago
  Security researcher Matthew Green requested Gmail end their DKIM's non-repudiation: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25113482 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25113482 > Modern DKIM deployments are problematic because they incentivize a specific kind of crime: theft of private emails for use in public blackmail and extortion campaigns.
waste_monk 4y ago
Who would ever want this? we are living in hell.
- cloudking 4y ago
  I think this was initially built to enable Google Docs commenting within Gmail, then expanded to third parties. The Docs feature is actually useful.
- password4321 4y ago
  Everyone who responds to indicate their attendance of a Google Calendar event?
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- xd1936 4y ago
  You get a flight booking email confirmation. It contains the day and time of your departure. Two weeks later, the flight takeoff time is moved up by an hour. It's nice to see that information reflected in the initial confirmation email when you go to look it up and find your confirmation number or whatever. That's off the top of my head...
  - deno 4y ago
    Send another email with the same thread-id with the updated info and when you navigate in Gmail’s UI to the thread the most recent message is shown and the rest is collapsed. This is already possible. You could add some metadata to make this intentional, e.g. message-type: notification and message-obsoletes-id: <prev msg id>... something like that. The AMP’s schtick is to make emails into widgets. It’s not so much that it’s bad (potentially evil, though), but it makes email into a completely different thing. In my mind first it’s AMP, then Android Instant Apps or something, and before you know it you have DRM in your emails.
    - 4y ago
everfrustrated 4y ago
At this point I'm struggling to see much difference between the Microsoft of 20 years ago and the Google of today.
- giancarlostoro 4y ago
  I've said it before, Google Chrome is the modern IE in terms of pushing proprietary web solutions that block out the competition, I can't remember which services it was but a few times I've seen here on HN people complaining that new Google Products work only in Chrome, but if you fake the browser agent in Firefox, it works just the same, they are just blocking out other browsers, which is really bad, I wonder where that lands a company in ADA compliance if you cannot even access something in your browser due to some developer somewhere not thinking about other browsers.
  - asdajksah2123 4y ago
    There are differences though. Anyone can take the Chromium web engine and build their own browser on top, with tremendous amounts of control. Heck, this is such an attractive proposition that even Microsoft has done this. While the mono culture of a Chromium driven web is a huge problem, it's not the same as the IE problem. The biggest mistake IMO was the Firefox open source project focusing on building a browser as opposed to a web engine. Even nodejs was created on Chromium (and the difficulty of building node on Gecko was the primary reason why MS chose Chromium over Gecko). I suspect if we want to avoid a Chromium monoculture, we will need a similar split like the Netscape > Firefox one, where someone pulls out the Gecko rendering engine and builds an open source product/business on top of it.
    - dmitriid 4y ago
      > Anyone can take the Chromium web engine and build their own browser on top, with tremendous amounts of control. No. There's no "tremendous amount of control". You're still ~100% reliant on Chrome to produce all the features. > where someone pulls out the Gecko rendering engine and builds an open source product/business on top of it. What would be that business? Browsers are free. On top of that: you've ripped out the rendering engine. Now what? You still have to update it, and develop it, and keep up with the rest of the industry.
zebracanevra 4y ago
Interesting to see the responses here are mainly negative. I think email (and by extension, mail) is traditionally static because the medium never allowed for dynamic updates. I don't see the harm in trying to improve upon that. If a solution is found that allows for full transparency of those updates with sufficient privacy, why not? Should email stay the same as it has been for another 50 years? I don't think it will.
- Fnoord 4y ago
  The fact the content is static makes the content usable offline and suitable for archive purposes. I don't want this feature to be tarnished. In fact, it already has (and is already dynamic and online) thanks to HTML.
- adrianpthomas 4y ago
  I would agree but at least part of the issue is that Google has a poor track record within the email design community for having weird / wonky support of the standards that already exist. If they had worked on addressing some of those shortcomings alongside the launch of Amp for email, it would have gone a long way to promoting adoption.
- rickdeckard 4y ago
  An Email is supposed to be a document which reflects the state of a topic at the time it was sent. The fact that there is a need in the industry for distribution of dynamic content which provides different (more recent) information whenever it is read is clear. But maybe that's not an evolution of email but in direct contradiction to it. Maybe it's something entirely different that is needed ... an industry standard for notifications. Unfortunately the current landscape of the market is not favorable to create proper industry standards anymore like it used to, as all the big players feel that they have no need to co-work anymore to solve a cross-industry problem.
- tssva 4y ago
  The article is regarding something from Google so you are always going to have the anti-Google crowd come out and blast it no matter what it is. You also have the people that are still upset that anything except text is allowed in email. I have received dynamic email a couple of times over the last couple of years and each time it has been a pleasant experience. For example my local mechanic sent a reminder that it was time for my vehicle inspection and my oil change. I was able to schedule my appointment for these directly from the email without having my email reading interrupted by having to switch windows or tabs.
dr_kiszonka 4y ago
Not that dynamic email is not worth discussing, but, for some context, it has been around since at least 2019: https://www.tomsguide.com/us/gmail-dynamic-email,news-30318.html https://www.tomsguide.com/us/gmail-dynamic-email,news-30318....
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
Rackedup 4y ago
Being static is one of the main quality of email...
- bombcar 4y ago
  Any email with linked images was already "somewhat dynamic" - I've used (abused) this in the past to fix incorrect logos on emails that had already been sent, etc.
  - dingleberry420 4y ago
    Lots of mail hosters, like gmail, have been proxying and caching image requests for a while now.
  - peterhadlaw 4y ago
    Funny enough, this is the basis for one of David Copperfield's magic tricks. He sends the audience an email before the show starts, implores them to not open it (and I'm sure if they open it, it'll be blank or whatever). Then during the show, the audience comes up with a word that Copperfield could not have know. At the end of the show, he asks you to check that email that was sent long before the word was picked. Of course the word is "magically" there. In reality, the email was sent ahead of time with a linked image. The image contents at that URL are hot-swapped during the show to include that word... "magically".
  - einpoklum 4y ago
    Which is why email should not have linked images. It's too bad that mail clients encourage people to write HTML email by default. The default should be plain text, or perhaps better yet, text/markdown but without links as image sources.
  - JohnFen 4y ago
    Which is one of the several reasons why I don't allow my mailreader to resolve any external links.
gadders 4y ago
Why can't they kill the products everyone hates, instead of the ones people like?
nerdjon 4y ago
Yeah no. 100% no. All this screams to me is that google has way too much power in email to be able to implement something like this. On the one hand we have some companies trying to block things like tracker pixels and other static images for tracking purposes. Then we have google saying "lets make emails dynamic" and just making it easier to track. I hope no other email provider adds support for this. Email needs to remain static and platform agnostic.
- kotaKat 4y ago
  I wonder how this impacts legal discovery when your dynamic emails get rid of all the evidence that was ever emailed to a recipient.
  - Avamander 4y ago
    To be fair a lot of emails aren't very strong evidence anyways. A lot of vendors still don't DKIM-sign their mail, S/MIME is basically nonexistent, so it's not too difficult to forge a letter.
    - torstenvl 4y ago
      Beyond a reasonable doubt does not mean beyond any hypothetical, fanciful, or possible doubt. I think you'd have a hard time providing a jury with a reason to believe a particular e-mail was forged, particularly if there is other corroborating evidence. And that only applies in criminal proceedings - under a preponderance standard you'd have even more of an uphill battle.
    - PenguinCoder 4y ago
      It's a lot easier for a single entity (ME) rather than a Corporation to get all this set right, I suppose. My personal domain email has DKIM,SPF,DMARC, and I send all my emails S/MIME signed at the least. Where I run into issues with this is for automatic/service account emails, like for monitoring alerts and the like. Either have to save the PW with the S/MIME cert command somehow, or just not S/MIME sign at all for service accounts.
- 4y ago
peanut_worm 4y ago
No one wants this.
Avamander 4y ago
I do think that we need some other markup language that is more consistent across platforms, but AMP doesn't sound like it. Neither should emails have dynamic content (though some vendors bypass that already with .gifs). I would already be satisfied with email clients supporting Markdown, but then it couldn't fully replace HTML in terms of flexibility. It'd just be a nicer middle ground between plain text and HTML.
corobo 4y ago
Dynamic or not I've found most emails these days don't include anything useful in the email anyway, you have to click through to get any information out of it. This could change that of course but the emails don't have information in them because of Gmail. Senders are already going out of their way to ruin the user experience just to stop Gmail slurping up all the information.
- Avamander 4y ago
  Gigabyte's service desk comes to mind "Hey come log in, support responded to your ticket", but there are many others. So annoying.
  - corobo 4y ago
    Amazon's order confirmations were the one I was thinking of. Got damn they're useless these days. Also remember when you could respond to social network messages via email? It was so useful! You don't even see the content anymore haha (that one's almost definitely to draw you back to the site tho)
- jasongill 4y ago
  It's actually not entirely that. Google appears to have some kind of unpublished "quality score" that is applied to emails received in a Gmail account, and it uses this score to determine if the message will appear on the inbox tab or in the promotions tab (or worse, the spam box). One big part of raising this mysterious and possibly just a myth "quality score" is to increase your emails open rates and especially your click-to-open rate. Basically, the more people you get to open your email and then to click through to your website, the better that Google will think your emails are performing and the more likely they are to appear in the inbox in the future. Plus, clicking through an email provides tracking information not only to Google, but also to the site you clicked through to, which helps them with their marketing campaigns or whatever else they are doing with their tracking info. There is an entire pseudo-science that email marketing people use in attempts to increase deliverability and "inboxing" in Gmail and a lot of it just comes down to "get more people to click through to your website", and it does appear to help, at least anecdotally.
jgalt212 4y ago
Embrace, extend, and extinguish https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis...
ravenstine 4y ago
Those of us that are software developers need to reject this if possible. I regret not doing enough to inform my organization on why AMP should be considered harmful back when it was becoming a thing. Even though they likely would have still gone ahead with it, there was still a decent chance they could have been persuaded.
einpoklum 4y ago
Google + Your private information = No, even before this "dynamic interaction" business. Use FOSS mail clients, using standard protocols, with IMAP, POP3 and SMTP servers.
soheil 4y ago
I wonder if snail mail will ever become dynamic. AMP for snail mail?
rakoo 4y ago
I can't get past the feeling that this is what Wave could have been, and now I'm torn between the infinite possibilities it opens up and the horror that Google will have even more power over their kind of emails no one should support. I think the idea is good but the semantics aren't aligned: if a "thing" is to be modified, it can't be an email. There is too much history ingrained about emails being static and updates appearing in another email. But maybe this can open up a new form of collaboration that never mentions the word "email" but uses SMTP/IMAP as a transport. I'm thinking about what Deltachat is doing and it's using the protocols to transport "metadata" information that is not to be read directly by users. They even created embedded apps to further the capabilities and give users a way to do much more than just exchanging messages: https://webxdc.org/ https://webxdc.org/ All in all there is a place for self-modifiable documents with updates transported via SMTP, but the semantics need to be very clear. And it's hard to believe Google and follow it to be a good steward for an open, beneficial protocol and idea.
ticviking 4y ago
I'm beginning to think it's time to migrate back to plain text email.
asdajksah2123 4y ago
Is this an open standard that other email clients could also implement?
ChrisArchitect 4y ago
Don't post this like it's something new. It has been around since 2019. With all the usual pushback and everyone being annoyed it even exists. But has adoption picked up? Probably no. It's not new.
m-p-3 4y ago
Turned it off as soon as it came out.

70 points by soheil 4y ago

was I the only one that read this like... oh, this is how we plan on getting past your carefully curated spam filter, by changing the email after it slides in?

soheil 4y ago
Clever but I wonder if the dynamic content also gets spam checked again in the context of original email and only displayed if it passes.

57FkMytWjyFu 4y ago

And here's how to disable it for a user, because the document suggests that it's only for administrators. https://www.howtogeek.com/427457/how-to-disable-dynamic-emails-in-gmail/ https://www.howtogeek.com/427457/how-to-disable-dynamic-emai...

janosdebugs 4y ago

This really sounds like a (security) accident waiting to happen, or the very least, building a walled garden system.

agileAlligator 4y ago
> This really sounds like a (security) accident waiting to happen That was my first thought. Just requires one vulnerability, and boom everyone who has a gmail account is at risk

ocdtrekkie 4y ago

This is one of those things everyone told the allegedly "open" AMP project was a very, very bad idea, and the AMP project lead basically told everyone Gmail was doing it whether people liked it or not, and then insinuated anyone who had an issue with it was violating the Code of Conduct.

seanhunter 4y ago
It’s quite astonishing to think how divorced from reality you must be to see how badly the whole AMP thing has gone and think “Yup AMP for gmail. That’s what we need.”
- ushakov 4y ago
  they don’t care, they need a promotion
dmitriid 4y ago
Don't forget all questions about this were ignored, issues on GutHub were closed, and then the project lead wrote a self-congratulatory blog post on how the whole AMP process is open and transparent.

ftyhbhyjnjk 4y ago

Will this render emails as source of truth in legal cases useless?

password4321 4y ago
Security researcher Matthew Green requested Gmail end their DKIM's non-repudiation: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25113482 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25113482 > Modern DKIM deployments are problematic because they incentivize a specific kind of crime: theft of private emails for use in public blackmail and extortion campaigns.

waste_monk 4y ago

Who would ever want this? we are living in hell.

cloudking 4y ago
I think this was initially built to enable Google Docs commenting within Gmail, then expanded to third parties. The Docs feature is actually useful.
password4321 4y ago
Everyone who responds to indicate their attendance of a Google Calendar event?
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
xd1936 4y ago
You get a flight booking email confirmation. It contains the day and time of your departure. Two weeks later, the flight takeoff time is moved up by an hour. It's nice to see that information reflected in the initial confirmation email when you go to look it up and find your confirmation number or whatever. That's off the top of my head...
- deno 4y ago
  Send another email with the same thread-id with the updated info and when you navigate in Gmail’s UI to the thread the most recent message is shown and the rest is collapsed. This is already possible. You could add some metadata to make this intentional, e.g. message-type: notification and message-obsoletes-id: <prev msg id>... something like that. The AMP’s schtick is to make emails into widgets. It’s not so much that it’s bad (potentially evil, though), but it makes email into a completely different thing. In my mind first it’s AMP, then Android Instant Apps or something, and before you know it you have DRM in your emails.
  - 4y ago

everfrustrated 4y ago

At this point I'm struggling to see much difference between the Microsoft of 20 years ago and the Google of today.

giancarlostoro 4y ago
I've said it before, Google Chrome is the modern IE in terms of pushing proprietary web solutions that block out the competition, I can't remember which services it was but a few times I've seen here on HN people complaining that new Google Products work only in Chrome, but if you fake the browser agent in Firefox, it works just the same, they are just blocking out other browsers, which is really bad, I wonder where that lands a company in ADA compliance if you cannot even access something in your browser due to some developer somewhere not thinking about other browsers.
- asdajksah2123 4y ago
  There are differences though. Anyone can take the Chromium web engine and build their own browser on top, with tremendous amounts of control. Heck, this is such an attractive proposition that even Microsoft has done this. While the mono culture of a Chromium driven web is a huge problem, it's not the same as the IE problem. The biggest mistake IMO was the Firefox open source project focusing on building a browser as opposed to a web engine. Even nodejs was created on Chromium (and the difficulty of building node on Gecko was the primary reason why MS chose Chromium over Gecko). I suspect if we want to avoid a Chromium monoculture, we will need a similar split like the Netscape > Firefox one, where someone pulls out the Gecko rendering engine and builds an open source product/business on top of it.
  - dmitriid 4y ago
    > Anyone can take the Chromium web engine and build their own browser on top, with tremendous amounts of control. No. There's no "tremendous amount of control". You're still ~100% reliant on Chrome to produce all the features. > where someone pulls out the Gecko rendering engine and builds an open source product/business on top of it. What would be that business? Browsers are free. On top of that: you've ripped out the rendering engine. Now what? You still have to update it, and develop it, and keep up with the rest of the industry.

zebracanevra 4y ago

Interesting to see the responses here are mainly negative. I think email (and by extension, mail) is traditionally static because the medium never allowed for dynamic updates. I don't see the harm in trying to improve upon that. If a solution is found that allows for full transparency of those updates with sufficient privacy, why not? Should email stay the same as it has been for another 50 years? I don't think it will.

Fnoord 4y ago
The fact the content is static makes the content usable offline and suitable for archive purposes. I don't want this feature to be tarnished. In fact, it already has (and is already dynamic and online) thanks to HTML.
adrianpthomas 4y ago
I would agree but at least part of the issue is that Google has a poor track record within the email design community for having weird / wonky support of the standards that already exist. If they had worked on addressing some of those shortcomings alongside the launch of Amp for email, it would have gone a long way to promoting adoption.
rickdeckard 4y ago
An Email is supposed to be a document which reflects the state of a topic at the time it was sent. The fact that there is a need in the industry for distribution of dynamic content which provides different (more recent) information whenever it is read is clear. But maybe that's not an evolution of email but in direct contradiction to it. Maybe it's something entirely different that is needed ... an industry standard for notifications. Unfortunately the current landscape of the market is not favorable to create proper industry standards anymore like it used to, as all the big players feel that they have no need to co-work anymore to solve a cross-industry problem.
tssva 4y ago
The article is regarding something from Google so you are always going to have the anti-Google crowd come out and blast it no matter what it is. You also have the people that are still upset that anything except text is allowed in email. I have received dynamic email a couple of times over the last couple of years and each time it has been a pleasant experience. For example my local mechanic sent a reminder that it was time for my vehicle inspection and my oil change. I was able to schedule my appointment for these directly from the email without having my email reading interrupted by having to switch windows or tabs.

dr_kiszonka 4y ago

Not that dynamic email is not worth discussing, but, for some context, it has been around since at least 2019: https://www.tomsguide.com/us/gmail-dynamic-email,news-30318.html https://www.tomsguide.com/us/gmail-dynamic-email,news-30318....

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

Rackedup 4y ago

Being static is one of the main quality of email...

bombcar 4y ago
Any email with linked images was already "somewhat dynamic" - I've used (abused) this in the past to fix incorrect logos on emails that had already been sent, etc.
- dingleberry420 4y ago
  Lots of mail hosters, like gmail, have been proxying and caching image requests for a while now.
- peterhadlaw 4y ago
  Funny enough, this is the basis for one of David Copperfield's magic tricks. He sends the audience an email before the show starts, implores them to not open it (and I'm sure if they open it, it'll be blank or whatever). Then during the show, the audience comes up with a word that Copperfield could not have know. At the end of the show, he asks you to check that email that was sent long before the word was picked. Of course the word is "magically" there. In reality, the email was sent ahead of time with a linked image. The image contents at that URL are hot-swapped during the show to include that word... "magically".
- einpoklum 4y ago
  Which is why email should not have linked images. It's too bad that mail clients encourage people to write HTML email by default. The default should be plain text, or perhaps better yet, text/markdown but without links as image sources.
- JohnFen 4y ago
  Which is one of the several reasons why I don't allow my mailreader to resolve any external links.

gadders 4y ago

Why can't they kill the products everyone hates, instead of the ones people like?

nerdjon 4y ago

Yeah no. 100% no. All this screams to me is that google has way too much power in email to be able to implement something like this. On the one hand we have some companies trying to block things like tracker pixels and other static images for tracking purposes. Then we have google saying "lets make emails dynamic" and just making it easier to track. I hope no other email provider adds support for this. Email needs to remain static and platform agnostic.

kotaKat 4y ago
I wonder how this impacts legal discovery when your dynamic emails get rid of all the evidence that was ever emailed to a recipient.
- Avamander 4y ago
  To be fair a lot of emails aren't very strong evidence anyways. A lot of vendors still don't DKIM-sign their mail, S/MIME is basically nonexistent, so it's not too difficult to forge a letter.
  - torstenvl 4y ago
    Beyond a reasonable doubt does not mean beyond any hypothetical, fanciful, or possible doubt. I think you'd have a hard time providing a jury with a reason to believe a particular e-mail was forged, particularly if there is other corroborating evidence. And that only applies in criminal proceedings - under a preponderance standard you'd have even more of an uphill battle.
  - PenguinCoder 4y ago
    It's a lot easier for a single entity (ME) rather than a Corporation to get all this set right, I suppose. My personal domain email has DKIM,SPF,DMARC, and I send all my emails S/MIME signed at the least. Where I run into issues with this is for automatic/service account emails, like for monitoring alerts and the like. Either have to save the PW with the S/MIME cert command somehow, or just not S/MIME sign at all for service accounts.
4y ago

peanut_worm 4y ago

No one wants this.

Avamander 4y ago

I do think that we need some other markup language that is more consistent across platforms, but AMP doesn't sound like it. Neither should emails have dynamic content (though some vendors bypass that already with .gifs). I would already be satisfied with email clients supporting Markdown, but then it couldn't fully replace HTML in terms of flexibility. It'd just be a nicer middle ground between plain text and HTML.

corobo 4y ago

Dynamic or not I've found most emails these days don't include anything useful in the email anyway, you have to click through to get any information out of it. This could change that of course but the emails don't have information in them because of Gmail. Senders are already going out of their way to ruin the user experience just to stop Gmail slurping up all the information.

Avamander 4y ago
Gigabyte's service desk comes to mind "Hey come log in, support responded to your ticket", but there are many others. So annoying.
- corobo 4y ago
  Amazon's order confirmations were the one I was thinking of. Got damn they're useless these days. Also remember when you could respond to social network messages via email? It was so useful! You don't even see the content anymore haha (that one's almost definitely to draw you back to the site tho)
jasongill 4y ago
It's actually not entirely that. Google appears to have some kind of unpublished "quality score" that is applied to emails received in a Gmail account, and it uses this score to determine if the message will appear on the inbox tab or in the promotions tab (or worse, the spam box). One big part of raising this mysterious and possibly just a myth "quality score" is to increase your emails open rates and especially your click-to-open rate. Basically, the more people you get to open your email and then to click through to your website, the better that Google will think your emails are performing and the more likely they are to appear in the inbox in the future. Plus, clicking through an email provides tracking information not only to Google, but also to the site you clicked through to, which helps them with their marketing campaigns or whatever else they are doing with their tracking info. There is an entire pseudo-science that email marketing people use in attempts to increase deliverability and "inboxing" in Gmail and a lot of it just comes down to "get more people to click through to your website", and it does appear to help, at least anecdotally.

jgalt212 4y ago

Embrace, extend, and extinguish https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis...

ravenstine 4y ago

Those of us that are software developers need to reject this if possible. I regret not doing enough to inform my organization on why AMP should be considered harmful back when it was becoming a thing. Even though they likely would have still gone ahead with it, there was still a decent chance they could have been persuaded.

einpoklum 4y ago

Google + Your private information = No, even before this "dynamic interaction" business. Use FOSS mail clients, using standard protocols, with IMAP, POP3 and SMTP servers.

soheil 4y ago

I wonder if snail mail will ever become dynamic. AMP for snail mail?

rakoo 4y ago

I can't get past the feeling that this is what Wave could have been, and now I'm torn between the infinite possibilities it opens up and the horror that Google will have even more power over their kind of emails no one should support. I think the idea is good but the semantics aren't aligned: if a "thing" is to be modified, it can't be an email. There is too much history ingrained about emails being static and updates appearing in another email. But maybe this can open up a new form of collaboration that never mentions the word "email" but uses SMTP/IMAP as a transport. I'm thinking about what Deltachat is doing and it's using the protocols to transport "metadata" information that is not to be read directly by users. They even created embedded apps to further the capabilities and give users a way to do much more than just exchanging messages: https://webxdc.org/ https://webxdc.org/ All in all there is a place for self-modifiable documents with updates transported via SMTP, but the semantics need to be very clear. And it's hard to believe Google and follow it to be a good steward for an open, beneficial protocol and idea.

ticviking 4y ago

I'm beginning to think it's time to migrate back to plain text email.

asdajksah2123 4y ago

Is this an open standard that other email clients could also implement?

ChrisArchitect 4y ago

Don't post this like it's something new. It has been around since 2019. With all the usual pushback and everyone being annoyed it even exists. But has adoption picked up? Probably no. It's not new.

m-p-3 4y ago

Turned it off as soon as it came out.