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I have wondered this as well. Nearly 10 years ago I applied to yCombinator with an idea for a new type of email that was based on semantic markup in messages th

I have wondered this as well. Nearly 10 years ago I applied to yCombinator with an idea for a new type of email that was based on semantic markup in messages that would enable hundreds of these types of actions to be done right in the message view, without ever leaving the app. At the time we identified Gmail actions as a major threat, since they had I think 4 actions. I fully expected that in a decade, there would be hundreds of them and they would be commonplace. Things like book now, buy now, answering a multiple choice question, etc. But 10 years later and adoption seems to be less, not more.

michaelmior 3y ago
I think it would be near impossible to break into this space from the outside. I can't imagine how anyone aside from a major email provider would be able to meaningfully implement this as a business. It seems you would have to rely on the major players to implement this, and if they do, why would they pay you at all for it?
- byoung2 3y ago
  That's why we're stuck with Gmail as the state of the art 10 years later.
- byoung2 3y ago
  From our YC app we explained that our plan for adoption would focus on add-ons for existing email clients to display the markup and to capture metadata when emails are composed (Gmail and Chrome extensions, plugins for Outlook, Thunderbird, etc). We would also for partnerships with email marketing companies like ConstantContact and MailChimp to add these to their templates. The idea would be to charge the companies running campaigns for API calls made from the end users' email clients (SaaS model).
  - michaelmior 3y ago
    That seems like a pretty sensible path. Somehow at the time I wrote my comment I hadn't considered the fact that many popular email clients are extensible.