AMP For Email Is a Terrible Idea (techcrunch.com) 177
An anonymous reader shares an excerpt from a report via TechCrunch, written by Devin Coldewey: Google just announced a plan to "modernize" email with its Accelerated Mobile Pages platform, allowing "engaging, interactive, and actionable email experiences." Does that sound like a terrible idea to anyone else? It sure sounds like a terrible idea to me, and not only that, but an idea borne out of competitive pressure and existing leverage rather than user needs. Not good, Google. Send to trash. See, email belongs to a special class. Nobody really likes it, but it's the way nobody really likes sidewalks, or electrical outlets, or forks. It not that there's something wrong with them. It's that they're mature, useful items that do exactly what they need to do. They've transcended the world of likes and dislikes. Email too is simple. It's a known quantity in practically every company, household, and device. The implementation has changed over the decades, but the basic idea has remained the same since the very first email systems in the '60s and '70s, certainly since its widespread standardization in the '90s and shift to web platforms in the '00s. The parallels to snail mail are deliberate (it's a payload with an address on it) and simplicity has always been part of its design (interoperability and privacy came later). No company owns it. It works reliably and as intended on every platform, every operating system, every device. That's a rarity today and a hell of a valuable one.
More important are two things: the moat and the motive. The moat is the one between communications and applications. Communications say things, and applications interact with things. There are crossover areas, but something like email is designed and overwhelmingly used to say things, while websites and apps are overwhelmingly designed and used to interact with things. The moat between communication and action is important because it makes it very clear what certain tools are capable of, which in turn lets them be trusted and used properly. We know that all an email can ever do is say something to you (tracking pixels and read receipts notwithstanding). It doesn't download anything on its own, it doesn't run any apps or scripts, attachments are discrete items, unless they're images in the HTML, which is itself optional. Ultimately the whole package is always just going to be a big , static chunk of text sent to you, with the occasional file riding shotgun. Open it a year or ten from now and it's the same email. And that proscription goes both ways. No matter what you try to do with email, you can only ever say something with it -- with another email. If you want to do something, you leave the email behind and do it on the other side of the moat.
More important are two things: the moat and the motive. The moat is the one between communications and applications. Communications say things, and applications interact with things. There are crossover areas, but something like email is designed and overwhelmingly used to say things, while websites and apps are overwhelmingly designed and used to interact with things. The moat between communication and action is important because it makes it very clear what certain tools are capable of, which in turn lets them be trusted and used properly. We know that all an email can ever do is say something to you (tracking pixels and read receipts notwithstanding). It doesn't download anything on its own, it doesn't run any apps or scripts, attachments are discrete items, unless they're images in the HTML, which is itself optional. Ultimately the whole package is always just going to be a big , static chunk of text sent to you, with the occasional file riding shotgun. Open it a year or ten from now and it's the same email. And that proscription goes both ways. No matter what you try to do with email, you can only ever say something with it -- with another email. If you want to do something, you leave the email behind and do it on the other side of the moat.
Hello Virus! (Score:5, Insightful)
What a great way to spread malicious code!
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What a great way to spread malicious code!
Indeed. That's the very first thought that came to my mind. Even if it doesn't act as a gateway to malware, the only people who will end up taking the time to use this is advertising people. You're not going to write a interactive e-mail for your buddy to ask him if he's watching the game tonight.
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It's like Google is bound and determined to repeat each of Microsoft's greatest mistakes.
No, Google, we don't need to new virus vector. We've got plenty, thanks.
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Google's surpassed MS's fuckups quite a while ago.
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The only use I can see for "engaging, interactive, and actionable email experiences" is for Spam advertisements with bells and whistles. It had better be disableable - or bye bye gmail. That's not what email is for, and I'm certainly not going to enable my email client to annoy me more than is absolutely necessary.
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Likely illegal in Canada too - as is some of the stuff that's done now with Apple/Yahoo/etc. tagging stuff to the bottom of emails
Apple tagging E-Mail? (Score:2)
Where is apple tagging stuff to the bottom of emails?
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On my Android phone, I can edit a similar message out of my emails. Not sure how to eliminate it globally via some application setting but at least I can remove it. Is removing this message tag disallowed on Apple's phones?
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On IOS I think "Send from my iThing" is just the default email signature, trivially changed from the obvious place in the settings. At least, I can remember getting rid of it as the first thing I did on my new device many years ago and now the signature setting is the only place I can see where it might have been. Mind you, I'm talking IOS 7.1.2 (the most up to date for my very old device) but I doubt the situation has changed much.
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Didn't worms like I.LOVE.YOU and other malware spread by "smart/active/live" E-mails teach us this same shit back in the early 2000s?
Google needs to understand that we don't want this shit. We get ads at us every single other way.
AMP ensures that I will be using a good MTA (Thunderbird, hell even Outlook is housebroken enough to not show Web content) instead of a web browser for my E-mail. Worst case, I always have mutt on a command line.
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Absolutely. Now, I've been online a long time (like, late '91), and back in the high days of usenet, it was a joke on newbies to tell them they could catch a virus by reading an email.
Until Bill the Gatrs* made if factual.
And here I thought google's mission statement started with "first, do no wrong".
I read my email as plain text. I don't catch anything, well, except for little details, like, "why is the IRS sending me email from Brazil?"
* Like Bill the Cat, coughing up another hairball.
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Google is full of bad ideas lately (Score:3, Insightful)
Let's see: AMP for GMAIL = bad. HTTPS Everywhere = BAD, Youtube demonitization schemes left up to algorithms = BAD
Anyone see the pattern? The pattern is that Google thinks it owns the web now.
Re:Google is full of bad ideas lately (Score:5, Insightful)
Let's see: AMP for GMAIL = bad. HTTPS Everywhere = BAD, Youtube demonitization schemes left up to algorithms = BAD
Anyone see the pattern? The pattern is that Google thinks it owns the web now.
Well, you were mostly right.
The need for pushing HTTPS everywhere was born for a valid reason, so that is a rather shitty example of a "BAD" move.
Embrace and Extend (Score:2)
Yes lets take the most rock solid pillar of internet communication and extend it so it only works right in Chrome Broswers.
What a Microsoft-1990s move. It's the reason everyone hated microsoft for a decade. Embrace and extend.
But they never had the gall to go this big. Why not embrace and extend TCIP too google? They already are doing DNS so it wouldn't be that hard. Facebook's VPN might give it a whirl too.
Email is dead (Score:2)
Nobody under 20 uses it. They use whatever proprietary messaging app their friends use this year. And they are getting older every year.
Middle aged women use Facebook messenger.
Email is dead. Get over it.
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You and your 13-year-old friends can use whatever you want, but in the a
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Nobody under 20 uses it. They use whatever proprietary messaging app their friends use this year. And they are getting older every year.
Middle aged women use Facebook messenger.
Email is dead. Get over it.
Thank you for clarifying why so many 20-year olds are still living in their parents basement. Guess they should stop whining about not being able to find a job and get over it.
Re:https everywhere is about control (Score:5, Informative)
What about Let's Encrypt. My website is https for no additional cost.
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It still costs server load and electricity.
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The incremental cost is negligible and in many (most now?) cases HTTPS connections provide better throughput.
Citation: I work on quantum-safe crypto.
Re:https everywhere is about control (Score:5, Insightful)
This works as long as people are putting up with them. And until they notice "Page works in Firefox and even Edge but fails in Chrome and Safari", and the page owners also tell them why, i.e. because Google and Apple deliberately broke their browsers.
I'd dare to say that if they started rejecting the likes of Let's Encrypt, which would cause nearly every non-commercial site to instantly be considered insecure (and with HSTS this means unreachable), people would very quickly notice this, and they'd also notice quickly that the page works fine with alternative browsers.
And you know people: Given the choice between being able to reach their wanted content and being secure, they throw security to the ground before stomping over it. They would instantly dump Chrome and install Firefox instead if that's all it takes to get back onto their page.
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Yes, today you can get your own SSL certificate from a few fly by night companies, bury Google and Apple effectively control who gets to publish valid SSL certificates and have demonstrated willingness to use that hammer.
While I agreed with your other point, this is just not true. Google and other browser companies can only add and remove trusted Root CAs. This doesn't allow them to control over end-entities that get issues SSL certificates. Removing trust from a specific root is a nuclear option, that lacks any kind of finite control. If Google decided they don't like Org ABC, there is nothing they could do to prevent Org ABC from getting an SSL cert that would be trusted by Chrome.
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Re:https everywhere is about control (Score:5, Insightful)
Just because the idea is blatantly self-serving, doesn't mean it's wrong in general.
Yes, Google may indirectly benefit from HTTPS everywhere. However, HTTPS everywhere IS needed, because the parade of malicious actors never stops and every layer of security we add can only be a good thing.
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I just got over having to pay for a certificate just like I got over having top pay for a domain name.
The Internet isn't free. Information doesn't 'know' anything, much less if it's 'free'. Given a choice people will not pay for anything unless the free is not useful.
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No wonder they are working so hard on AI, the first job it should be tasked with is taking over the business decisions at Google. Because clearly there is no intelligent life there to be found.
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Yes, I see a pattern of knee-jerk reactions to technology implementations.
The ideas are not terrible. It is often the implementation combined with ego preventing such ideas to be better perfected.
AMP for GMail isn't necessarily bad. However the push to the user nature of email makes it a risky topic to perfect. Normal HTML encoded emails had created a mountain of security problems. Having a robust running web app in your email could make it much harder to keep peoples data safe. Fake email from the DMV
Plain text? (Score:2, Informative)
If you send me an email in anything other than plain text it's not even going to get downloaded from the mailserver.
Re:Plain text? (Score:5, Funny)
If you send me an email in anything other than plain text it's not even going to get downloaded from the mailserver.
So you didn't get the Amazon gift card for $1000 I sent you?
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I don't mind the limited markup of having fonts, italic, etc that markup languages provide; but I agree it should not be wide open and non-regulated. The RFCs should have placed restrictions on specific tags to avoid embedded crap. Just have a short list of approved tags and be done with it the same way forums have a basic list of tags.
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This makes perfect sense and the people out to do good would approve. The people who could care less as long as they make a buck otherwise are going to constantly block ideas like this.
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Why? Just use a reader that doesn't run code.
Re:Plain text? (Score:4, Informative)
There are few e-mail clients even capable of sending plain text e-mail, let alone clients that do so by default.
Really? Apple Mail (macOS and iOS), Thunderbird, and K9 Mail are all happy to have plain text set as their composing format. I've not seen a mail client that can't send plain text.
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Those few being Outlook (including OWA which I am using right now to send pure text emails), Apple Mail (macOS and iOS), Thunderbird, K9, Pmail, the Bat!, mutt, pine, mailx, gmail... basically, well over 99% of the mail clients that anyone actually uses. Those are the only ones that can send plain text.
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That is BS. I read email via mutt, and I just recently had to implement a html2txt converter because of a tiny number of html-only emails. All others are text or at least text + html.
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Security (Score:5, Insightful)
New ads deep into the OS thats trusts the ads more than the user.
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You mean, like Windows 10?
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Google likes AMP for two reasons: tracking and ads. With AMP, your emails will be tracked, and Google will know who is reading what mail for what length of time, likely even if no mail is sent via gmail. Plus, say goodbye to S/MIME.
The Truth about Features (Score:5, Insightful)
Dear Consumer,
It doesn't matter what you want. You'll get what makes us the most profit, and like it.
Fuck You Very Much, and Have a Nice Day.
Hugs and Kisses,
- Your Friendly Neighborhood Free Service Provider
Re:The Truth about Features (Score:4, Informative)
Dear Consumer ^H^H^H^H^H Product,
It doesn't matter what you want. You'll get what makes us the most profit, and like it.
Fuck You Very Much, and Have a Nice Day.
Hugs and Kisses,
- Your Friendly Neighborhood Free Service Provider
Fixed it for you.
Nobody likes it? (Score:3, Interesting)
Saying nobody really likes it is easily proven wrong. I do like it. My employees manage their tasks through their mail boxes. Now reports, alerts and what not can be interactive and accompanied by forms where they can take action. Directly in the e-mail client. And once they are done, they move e-mail to the DONE folder. And they can use tags, search, filters, and what not. And suddenly we no longer need to build this functionality for the intranet.
The reason why e-mail is so limited is because back in the day Microsoft and others did not know how to make it secure. Time to move on and stop being a Luddite.
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Yeah, but which direction? Nobody gets any rest anymore, and we are drowning in more bureaucracy. We generate much more paperwork than ever. And worse, we lost our secretaries! Now we have to type our own shit! This keyboard crap is so primitive! Thank god for facebook and youtube!
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Also youtube.......I don't understand people who'd rather watch a video than read a transcript.
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Also youtube.......I don't understand people who'd rather watch a video than read a transcript.
I'd rather watch a video than read a transcript of the video. But I'd far rather read a well laid out article on the subject than either of those options.
A transcript has all the limitations of the video format, but without any of the advantages i.e. it must be extremely brief, usually to the point of omitting important details, but at the same time a transcript misses all the visual detail that can add so much to so many things. Meanwhile a well written article can give you more detail in the same amount o
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The reason why e-mail is so limited is because back in the day Microsoft and others did not know how to make it secure.
And they still haven't. That is one of the major problems.
Re:Nobody likes it? (Score:4, Insightful)
They could start by not letting it run ANY code...
This isn't a hard concept, nobody expects their email to run applications, or connect out to remote servers, or anything like that. The most anyone will ever want from their email is some formatting (bold, italic, colour, font size) that's easy to implement without adding the capability to run full scripting languages and reach out to every remote ad server on the planet.
The problem isn't that companies don't know how to make it secure, it's that their business model relies on it being insecure. If email clients refused to reach out to remote servers when displaying a message, the companies couldn't track everything you do. If they didn't run scripts the companies would be limited to static ads.
Of course this is really the biggest problem with almost all innovation right now. The question is no longer "how do we make X better" but instead "how do we make X more profitable" It used to be that people assumed that doing the former would lead to the latter, now there's no attempt to even consider the former. This leads to thousands of non-interoperable walled gardens full of garbage nobody wants that is actively hostile to the users.
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Font size and style are not interactivity any more than a newspaper is interactive. The same with images that are included in the email. None of these require executing code on the receiver's computer, nor reaching out to external servers, only displaying text. Clickable links are the same thing, you put in an indicator that the link should be clickable and where it should go, but my computer decides what to do with it from there. Where it all falls down is as soon as you allow any scripting or applications
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Font size and style are not interactivity any more than a newspaper is interactive.
How do you dynamically change font size or font styles based on user interaction in the browser presently without JS?
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Why would anyone want it to be dynamic based on interaction?
People don't want their emails to be interactive.
I don't want the font size to change because I clicked something!
Whose emails are they? (Score:2)
Without JavaScript, senders cannot control their content. Like to say different things at different times. To enforce DRM. To self destruct.
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And I want that feature in my email why?
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I guess it should be mentioned that Microsoft has already been trying to take e-mail in this direction with Outlook on Office 360. They have notifications and the ability to add plug-ins.
I do worry a bit about Google's new platform, though. As many have mentioned, it could be used for nefarious purposes. I'm uneasy about the fact that people can "update" the e-mail they sent you. One thing I like about e-mail is that it can function like a permanent record.
What really made me raise my eyebrow is the fact th
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Microsoft always had issues with the internet.
Setting up a SLIP of PPP Server in windows 3.1 was very difficult. I actually switch to Linux back in the early 1990's so I can use the internet, as it was easier to connect with the dip command.
Windows 95 Internet was kinda an after thought, they really wanted people to use The Microsoft Network opposed to services like AOL, Prodigy and CompuServe.
Windows 98 - XP: You can use the internet but on Microsoft terms. Active-X and OS particular plugins were needed fo
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Rather than making email into an application, why not use an actual task management application?
do no evil (Score:3, Interesting)
Now we know why they removed the do no evil from their corporate culture.
Clearly Google is past the point of innovation, they are trying to "fix" something that isnt broken and no one really wants. I have my email server strip all media from emails and keep them in quarantine until i see the need for it and my client NEVER downloads anything from a server that isnt my own.
Email is for time insensitive communications and has no need for fancy pictures or themes. If you cant get your point across with out graphics then you best schedule a meeting because you will more than likely need to answer alot of questions after your presentation.
Back to the google, personally i cant wait until they fade in to obscurity like myspace or yahoo. The time is coming, we just need another competitor.
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Clearly Google is past the point of innovation, they are trying to "fix" something that isnt broken and no one really wants.
Like "fixing" horse carriages that worked by inventing a car? That's the very definition of innovation vs. simple repairing. Tinker with something even it is not broken. It's either improvement or breaking, but if it's in a new way it's innovation.
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That and I think they found out, whatever they do, people are going to accuse them of being evil.
Even early on in Googles history, people accused them because someones opposing idea was higher on the search results then their idea. And claim it is because Google is manipulating results.
moat (Score:3)
While I completely agree that email is good as it is and this is a monstrosity, I'm not so sure I agree there is a "moat" between email and applications.
Applications send email all the time. Email with links/buttons, which when clicked, interact with the applications. It's pretty cool, actually. So there's all kinds of interaction going on.
But - it's cool because it works with the limited tool set that email already has.
So maybe there is a moat - with a wide, comfortable drawbridge, but I agree that doesn't mean that we should drain the moat and fill it in with concrete.
I actually like email (Score:5, Insightful)
> "Nobody really likes it, but it's the way nobody really likes sidewalks, or electrical outlets, or forks"
perhaps it is because I am old, but I rather like the type of discord that email provides. I abhor new platforms for 'communication' such as twitter-for-twits and facebook, for those who spend more time documenting the fake shit they do than actually doing the stuff they supposedly do. The idea that someone can say something in 250 words or less and believe that its enough to persuade someone is ludicrous and practically justifies slapping their teachers across the face. A persuasive argument requires points and counter points; all packaged and detailed through the body of the single letter. Think of it as opening, or closing, arguments in a trial. Would you want your attorney standing up during closing arguments, addressing the jury and just say "find my client innocent or you suck. #freemyclient #emojisarecool!" Yet this is were social media has led an entire generation of millennials who literally now graduate public schools not knowing how to write in cursive, write a check, or properly fill out an envelope and apply postage.
Didn't google make a claim about 10yrs ago that they were revolutionizing email with an entirely new product?? I believe they called it 'Wave'. How did that turn out for them? It appears that, at least for that project, the mayan calendar did, in fact, cause the end of its civilization (ie they pulled the plug on it at the end of 2012)
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I completely agree. E-mail allows the art of letter writing to proliferate despite the fact that nobody uses the USPS to write letters anymore.
As for Wave, it served a niche as a collaborative project tool, and it was great. I used it and it's really unfortunate that Apache was never able to put it back together (I don't really understand why, Google gave it to them fully functional). I think the big problem with Wave is that it only served such a small niche, and it didn't have the potential to pillage and
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The idea that someone can say something in 250 words or less and believe that its enough to persuade someone is ludicrous and practically justifies slapping their teachers across the face.
Word count or your post (minus the initial quote): 236 /slap
I think TechCrunch is a terrible idea. (Score:1)
Why does that site even exist?
No company owns it is no longer true (Score:5, Interesting)
No company owns it. It works reliably and as intended on every platform, every operating system, every device. That's a rarity today and a hell of a valuable one.
This USED to be true, BUT people and businesses are OVERWHELMINGLY moving their E-mail service to Office365 AND Google Apps.
I'll say it again THIS IS A TRAP. Over 60% of mailboxes may very well already be on these services..... As this number approaches 70%, 80%, 90%..... STANDARDIZATION WILL BEGIN TO UNRAVEL. The trend is that E-mail is going to become a Microsoft and Google technology, BECAUSE everybody is moving to the cloud, and as it stands now; MS and Google have a Duopoly in this industry.
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If a business cannot use it to communicate with businesses or their customers then Office356 or GMail will be dropped instantly ....
MS Exchange/Outlook is massively propitiatory but did not have issues delivering emails to/from anyone not using it
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If a business cannot use it to communicate with businesses or their customers then Office356 or GMail will be dropped instantly ....
First of all... NO, and Hell No --- no business of significant size "Instantly" drops or replaces an E-mail provider; They will be GRADUALLY dropped and replaced with Only the other Alternate choice, because the "myriad" of competitors barely limping along these days don't really have even a chance, there's no high-paid cloud consultants that will be recommending them
More PR wanker speak. (Score:2, Insightful)
"engaging, interactive, and actionable email experiences."
WTF does that even mean.
I have to read an email, so I'm already engaging with it.
I have to reply to emails, so they're already actionable, and so interactive to an extent.
People like this twunt are the reason we have a 'Wanker Jar' in the meeting room at work.
It's like a swear jar, but for PR wankers. And it's surprisingly effective at training them to converse in a concise,meaningful way instead of spouting vague terms.
Beautiful Write Up, 100% agree (Score:2)
Great write up BeauHD (if I understand Slashdot's author reference). There is exactly nothing wrong with email, it's one of the most useful and reliable things in the tech world. Junkmail is annoying, so sadly companies have to spend a lot dealing with it, but other than that I wouldn't touch it.
Google making it interactive is a step in the wrong direction. They know just how critical email is and just want a way to turn it into the next mini-Facebook. No way, no how.
I can't see any organization accepting t
The Good News Is... (Score:1)
The good news is we can safely ignore them, as they cannot coerce and punish people to follow their wishes by threatening with a lower rank on their search engine.
"...actionable email experiences..." !?!?!?!?!? (Score:2)
Google search AMP (Score:2)
I switched my iPhone from using Google to DuckDuckGo for web searches because of AMP. So f*****g announced and intrusive. Now they have the arrogance to mess with email? Oh well I donâ(TM)t use gmail anyway because I already find the Google way with email so annoying. I guess enough people just go along with that this crap continues.
How the expectation for features changes... (Score:2)
Seriously. In the past, people were happy about new features, excited even, asking when they're going to come and how they can use them, with boards and media being abuzz with the previews and reviews and the how-tos and whatnot.
Today, the first question everyone asks when a new feature gets announced is "How do I turn it off?"
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New features used to mean new functionality that made people happy. New features now usually mean reduced functionality that makes the company more money.
There's a reason people aren't wishing for new features any more.
Malware, spyware, ads, bloat, AI (Score:2)
Seems like I was right to open up a few ProtonMail accounts sometime ago, I knew Google stupidity for trendy crap and messing with stuff that shouldn't be messed with would eventually catch their more traditional services and platforms...
Well, perhaps they are sane enough to make it an opt-in feature, depending on the real intentions behind the move.
To me, it's pretty simple: the more you enable "advanced features" in a given service or platform, the more potential it has to be exploited for all the bad rea
The Problem Google is Fixing (Score:3)
No company owns it [email].
That's the "problem" Google is fixing.
Modernize email? Maybe SMTP! (Score:2)
You cannot.
Like FTP is something buried deep into the story of internet.
You should not.
It works. If it works, you ain't fix it.
You can modernize SMTP , though.
For example, if the client is online during the delivery attempt you can/should deliver straight to it.
If not, to the mailbox.
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> You can modernize SMTP , though.
> For example, if the client is online during the delivery attempt
> you can/should deliver straight to it. If not, to the mailbox.
The logistics for that are impossible for POP email. How would you query the client? And no, I do *NOT* want an "email client" constantly listening to the internet and telling advertisers everything about me. Besides, my desktop is behind a NATing router/modem. I think I know now why the corporate powers behind IPV6 are so vehemently op
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You are already being tracked by your smartphone. What else worse?
This is about advertisements, not users! (Score:2)
"engaging, interactive, and actionable email experiences."
All of those words have to do with marketing. What user really wants their spam to be more "engaging, interactive, and actionable"? "Actionable" especially. That is Google-speak for "the user can initiate a purchase directly from the page". This change has absolutely nothing to do with providing a feature to users.
(actually, an ex did once say in response to a stated wish for ads to be illegal with the question "but how would we know what to buy?", but that's one reason why she's an ex.)
Re:Why? (Score:5, Informative)
For future reference, once does not "poo poo" an idea. One pooh poohs an idea. Even if the idea happens to be poo poo.
I'm not generally a stickler for spelling or usage, but this one sticks in my craw. And don't nobody want poo poo stuck up in their craw, best believe.
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Quite right. You've got to have standards.
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That's good. Watching that reminds me that I've never watched Blackadder. Back in the day, it didn't make it to my local public broadcasting station here in the states and I never got around to it.
Thanks.
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I'm not generally a stickler for spelling or usage, but this one sticks in my craw.
For one I agree with you, for all in tents and porpoises.
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The only reason you would even consider saying that is because you have no idea of history. Microsoft already tried to pull the "everything is an app" idea. The end result was an unmitigated nightmare. Ditto for Adobe with their earlier versions of PDF. This is why most modern email clients ignore script by default, and most decent emails clients won't permit downloading of data external to the email without the user explicitly clicking a button to do so (or setting up a whitelist, etc).
There is a REASO
Re: Why? (Score:2)
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Says the baby boomer who is still angry over the Graphical User Interface, and trolls on his amber vision vt100 terminal.
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Yep, I'm done with a lot of nonsense so I'm returning to the old days of putting my own server online. Not hosted by somebody else, completely under my own control.
My Web page (No Java)
No JavaScript perhaps?
I can't see how it matters if Java, Perl, or ASP were used on the server side generation of the webpage. It's all the same to the end-user.
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that brings up an entirely new question.. Did facebook and myspace kill the damn personal web pages? I can't even remember the last time someone had a someurl.com/~username/ link to hand out..
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Just try to validate an email address.
Why bother?
Re: (Score:1)
Verifying an email address may not be simple, but e-mail is.
Server 1 (sender): Hey Nameserver, what's the mail exchange record for contoso.com
Nameserver: Oh, it's 207.46.163.215
Server 1 is impolite and doesn't thank the name server, but goes on its merry way.
Server 1 (sender): Hey 207.46.163.215, EHLO
contoso.com: 250 contoso.com [207.46.163.215]
Server 1: MAIL FROM: soandso@microsoft.com
contoso.com: 250 Sender OK
Server 1: RCPT TO: soandso@contoso.com
contoso.com 250 Recipient OK
Server 1: DATA
contoso.com (if n
Re:Had to switch to desktop mode to read post (Score:4)
No, AMP would be a horrible idea.
Stopping this charade that mobile devices should get inferior pages on every website instead of the full experience on the other hand would be a good idea.
Cell phones these days have almost as much processing power as full computers. They often have higher resolution screens, and are fully capable of using the internet, Unfortunately a large percentage of the internet is crippled when you try to browse it without manually telling each webpage that you want desktop mode, and even then many sites refuse to oblige and continue to serve the crippled version of their site.
There should be no such thing as a "mobile" website. There should just be "websites" because I have never once met a desktop site that didn't work on my phone, and I have never once met a "mobile" site that was better in any way than the desktop version of the same site when accessing them from my phone.
AMP needs to die.
Mobile pages need to die.
Let me access the actual site, by default, on my phone!
Re: (Score:2)
Your mobile browser does not let you pretend to be on desktop ?
Webites sometimes still probe further and find out you are on mobile, but most websites don't in my experience. Do you see many websites do that ?
Re: (Score:2)
The point is that it's stupid to have to manually tell each page that your computer is capable of being a computer. It should assume that if you got that far that you're using a device capable of browsing web pages and not neuter the pages!
Sure, I can fake my user agent string, but what a ridiculous world we live in if the only way to browse the web in a useful fashion is to have to trick each page in to doing what should be it's default operating mode.
There is absolutely ZERO excuse for ANY page to have a
Re: (Score:2)
Not each page. I have used multiple Android browsers that can be set to always default to desktop pages.
But sometimes I like the "mobile pages", as they are often simpler and even lack advertisements or other layout issues. It depends on the page and the website.
Re: (Score:2)
It used to be enough to save all your emails. Now you need to save screenshots of all of your emails.
But don't worry, they're working on developing AMP for screenshots, coming soon to a computer near you!
Re: (Score:2)
That's what I said in a post on the previous AMP article https://tech.slashdot.org/comm... [slashdot.org] Definitely not legal in situations where companies are required to keep records.