Google Makes Emails More Dynamic With AMP For Email (techcrunch.com) 114
Google today officially launched AMP for Email, its effort to turn emails from static documents into dynamic, web page-like experiences. From a report: AMP for Email is coming to Gmail, but other major email providers like Yahoo Mail, Outlook and Mail.ru will also support AMP emails. It's been more than a year since Google first announced this initiative. Even by Google standards, that's a long incubation phase, though there's also plenty of backend work necessary to make this feature work.
The promise of AMP for Email is that it'll turn basic messages into a surface for actually getting things done. "Over the past decade, our web experiences have changed enormously -- evolving from static flat content to interactive apps -- yet email has largely stayed the same with static messages that eventually go out of date or are merely a springboard to accomplishing a more complex task," Gmail product manager Aakash Sahney writes. "If you want to take action, you usually have to click on a link, open a new tab, and visit another website." With AMP for Email, those messages become interactive. That means you'll be able to RSVP to an event right from the message, fill out a questionnaire, browse through a store's inventory or respond to a comment -- all without leaving your web-based email client.
The promise of AMP for Email is that it'll turn basic messages into a surface for actually getting things done. "Over the past decade, our web experiences have changed enormously -- evolving from static flat content to interactive apps -- yet email has largely stayed the same with static messages that eventually go out of date or are merely a springboard to accomplishing a more complex task," Gmail product manager Aakash Sahney writes. "If you want to take action, you usually have to click on a link, open a new tab, and visit another website." With AMP for Email, those messages become interactive. That means you'll be able to RSVP to an event right from the message, fill out a questionnaire, browse through a store's inventory or respond to a comment -- all without leaving your web-based email client.
Web-based email client says it all (Score:1)
I remember the old fantasy that the Web would be the next operating system. Nobody really thought all that much about who would end up in control of that operating system.
Re:Web-based email client says it all (Score:5, Insightful)
I remember the old fantasy that the Web would be the next operating system. Nobody really thought all that much about who would end up in control of that operating system.
"Nobody really thought about it" really means you didn't think about it.
Lots of people thought about it. During the Browser Wars of Netscape v Microsoft starting in late 1995, control over who owns the future was discussed all the time. Companies spent untold billion dollars fighting for that control. Microsoft spent several billion dollars trying to embed their browser into the operating systems. The Netscape/AOL deal was $4.2 billion with companies desperate to be in control. Various players have entered and exited the field, but the war is still going strong.
Across all the companies, there have been several trillion dollars spent over the decades fighting for that control, and many companies were (and are) fighting to the death.
Ad (Score:2)
boy do i not want that (Score:5, Insightful)
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Google has never been about what people want. Google is about controlling people.
Which day is assault-a-google-developer-day again?
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Re:boy do i not want that (Score:5, Insightful)
I pretty much still have all my email client set to be plain text at least for my outgoing emails.
Re:boy do i not want that (Score:5, Informative)
I second this. #DoNotWant
Ya. Emails are messages. I get them, process them, and delete them.
This means you'll be able to RSVP to an event right from the message, fill out a questionnaire, browse through a store's inventory or respond to a comment -- all without leaving your web-based email client.
My goal is to spend less time in my email client, not more. I see how this might be good for Google, with people using their web interface, but it's a solution in search of a problem (or opportunity -- for Google).
Thankfully, I POP all my mail using Thunderbird and display all my mail as plain text (which is safer). Unfortunately, there are still some email messages that can only be displayed as HTML -- grrr.... Hopefully, I can avoid this AMP crap for a while.
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My goal is to spend less time in my email client, not more.
Seems like their goal with this is to have you spend less time (per-message) clicking around the browser altogether?
Re:boy do i not want that (Score:5, Insightful)
My goal is to spend less time in my email client, not more.
Seems like their goal with this is to have you spend less time (per-message) clicking around the browser altogether?
Their goal is to allow them to track you more. As AMP pages are served from Google AMP servers, this seems like it will help them a lot, regardless of the browser you use...
Re:boy do i not want that (Score:5, Insightful)
* remote execution exploits, due to increased content complexity in the inbox.
* data leak exploits.
* buggy emails!
* heaven for phishers.
Re:boy do i not want that (Score:5, Insightful)
And, /. is right. Google is full of clueless Internet noob lameness.
Even plain old HTML is wrong in email. [old.efn.no]
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>"so many ways this is not a good idea."
+10000
I couldn't agree with you more. I detest HTML Email. So I will detest this even more. ESPECIALLY since it will be even MORE annoying and proprietary (not working with all Email systems) and introduce even more compatibility, security, privacy, and performance issues.
I hope it fails.
Email and "experiences" (Score:5, Insightful)
I am tired of "experiences". What is wrong with a simple, fast, low-latency interface for mail? Good examples of this are Thunderbird, Roundcube, or even Mutt. Mail doesn't need to be "edgy". It needs to be quick, and support the usual features, so I can read whatever is there, reply, have rules to send the latest message from $VENDOR to a specific E-mail box, and support PGP and S/MIME.
Didn't we learn from the early 2000s with all the E-mail worms about "experiences" and "live content" in E-mails? Looks like Google forgot.
Re:Email and "experiences" (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Email and "experiences" (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem is that there's a lot less money in that than something that's insecure and likely to break.
We've already been through this with MS Office documents and PDFs getting additional functionality that just turned out to be a way of spreading malware. Documents, should have no scripting involved. They should display as consistently as possible and be basically static.
It's amazing how arrogant and ignorant these people are in thinking that this isn't going to end badly. We've seen it work out badly from a historical point of view, and now we're getting to see it again.
Not to mention the fact that this runs the risk of being like web standards back in the '90s where they were purposefully incompatible to force people to use a specific browser that had whatever arbitrary, pointless, bullshit feature the web dev had to use.
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You don't want to know this, but TrueType fonts use a Turing-complete VM to execute their hinting code.
So much for documents being static.
Re:Email and "experiences" (Score:4, Insightful)
7 bit ascii was not secure (Score:5, Informative)
Back in the day. When people laughed at people that thought they could be infected by emails.
Then put in a ESC sequence that, when the email was read, programmed their function keys to bounce back a message.
5 bit telex seems OK though.
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Email should be 7-bit ASCII for security and stability.
I am happy with Unicode UTF-8 encoded, there have been a few issues but not many. US-ASCII is not good enough if you want to write in German, Greek, etc, let alone Chinese or Arabic. But I could do without HTML, in-line images, colours, different fonts, etc.
The trouble is that many just don't get it. There is someone who I have to email who's minimum size email is about 130KB as the idiots have decided that every email has got to have huge images attached. These are the sort who are going to think that AMP
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Goes back earlier. Reminds me of "Active Desktop" in Windows 98 SE. It was so successful that the idea came back as live tiles in Windows 8/10.
Here here! (This x 1000) (Score:2, Interesting)
I am tired of "experiences". What is wrong with a simple, fast, low-latency interface for mail?
I agree 100000%
As anyone will say who has ever attempted to use Facebook (just try finding your old comment to follow up on in a big FB thread. Good luck with that.) or these crap online "discussion" forums to communicate, and still remembers the (mostly) text-only USENET discussion fora that united the world by subject, rather than splintering it by website or service, textual interfaces are so often vastly supe
Email is dead; this will help bury it. (Score:2)
All the kool kids are using siloed messengers like facebook, instagram, imessage, signal, .....
When the likes of you and I drop off our perches nobody will remember what email was.
AMP will accelerate this process. By embedding siloed message servers into the "surface" of the emails.
Lolz AMP (Score:2)
This is a Google branded solution to a problem they helped cause. They rather have another revenue stream than fix the issue.
I want my email STATIC, thanks! (Score:5, Insightful)
Sorry, once a message arrives in my INBOX, I do NOT want it to change. I want it STATIC!
Why do some people want to fix things that aren't broken?
If you want a messaging platform with non-static messages, DO NOT CALL IT E-MAIL!
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Indeed, it's bad enough that people are allowed to send emails that use images as essential pieces of the message without at least being attached to the email. This is just going to make things worse.
How many of today's emails are even going to be readable in a year's time? Or how about in 5 years? Documents are supposed to stay largely static, unless purposefully changed, and definitely not changed after being sent.
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Queue Exploits (Score:5, Insightful)
The promise of AMP for Email is that it'll turn basic messages into a surface for actually getting things done.
Things like increasing the attack surface of your e-mail client.
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Things like allowing Google to have more fingers in your email pie.
Gmail already has an entire fist up that pie.
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Even for major web apps that send email notifications this is a bad idea. For the AMP interactivity to work you probably need to be assumed to be logged in by virtue of being logged into email. Now you don't need to reset passwords to attack accounts from already having an email password.
Or worse, this uses third party cookies already in your browser. So now instead of a tracking pixel you have Facebook and everyone else tracing your email reads.
Um, no. (Score:5, Insightful)
Remember when companies jumped all over the html bandwagon for email? Outlook was especially awful at rendering, iirc, but generally the corporate design got in the way of the actual purpose, which was transmitting information.
Thankfully, people realized this, and probably 90% of the email I see now is just text. Maybe with a logo or something,but that's all.
Amp for email? That's just the html idiocy all over again, only now cached on Google's server for their data collection. No, thanks, please get lost.
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Thankfully, people realized this, and probably 90% of the email I see now is just text. Maybe with a logo or something,but that's all.
I find it useful to have a standardized markup for email. Indenting something I'm quoting without using a bunch of ">"s is nice. Seeing a picture inline instead of as an attachment is nice. "Mostly text" is ideal.
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Sure, but there are still "email is text only dammit" Slashdotters living in caves and trying to get the hang of fire. While it would have been better if RTF had caught on, that would require people to know HTML and something, rather than just HTML, which was never going to happen.
HTML as the markup language for email is not the devil, is my point.
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They want to MITM the whole web. This will be around for a long time.
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Why can't this be a Google project that dies?
Projects that give Google monetizable control will never - ever - die off
Please resend. Your message is broken/unreadable! (Score:5, Interesting)
I can't read your message. Please re-send as plain text.
I already get email messages that are HTML format with almost nothing but remote-loading images. Since I don't permit remote loaded content, those messages are unreadable. AMP sounds like a way to make this problem even more common.
Life expectancy for Google products (Score:3)
For those of us who don't want this feature, remember Google's life expectancy for their products.
https://www.fastcompany.com/90... [fastcompany.com]
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AMP-email = lotus notes (Score:1)
Congratulations for inventing a new type of email anti-pattern!
http://www.email-anti-patterns.com [email-anti-patterns.com]
Get off of my lawn! (Score:5, Insightful)
And by the way, how will this affect one's ability to rely on emails as reliable historical, (and perhaps legal), documentation? Will this new bit of shiny render 'going back through old emails' obsolete?
Then there's the prospect of full-on advertising in the body of an email. And will compatibility with regular email clients be maintained? I suspect not - Google and other players want us to do EVERYTHING via the browser, the better to control our 'experience'.
And WTF is (FTA) "a surface for actually getting things done"? AFAIC that's my desk. This new scheme is a 'surface' alright - it smells like an attack surface to me.
Can AMP be turned off? (Score:4, Interesting)
Just Another Attack Vector (Score:4, Insightful)
What could possibly go wrong?
Great (Score:4, Insightful)
just what we need, more features to support advertisers.
What's the use case for AMP in the context of a person sending another person an email?
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Microsoft (Score:2)
I think Microsoft learned this lesson ages ago, it's not a bad idea by itself but people abuse the hell out of email. Hopefully times have changed a bit.
Sounds like a nightmare (Score:2)
Give me PINE instead.
Plain text only (Score:3)
I only accept plain text email. Anything else is discarded. I guess email will finally die and I can't wait.
Don't leave the browser? (Score:2, Interesting)
I don't use a web browser to read email. I use an email client.
Sounds like a reason to switch (Score:2)
Proton Mail is sounding better all the time.
In before....! (Score:1)
.... everyone says "great!"
Oh wow. No one said great.
I don't think I've ever seen such solidarity in a /. thread. Everyone thinks this is a bad idea. It must truly be as bad as it sounds...
All hail... (Score:2)
"fancy" spam!
Dear God, no... (Score:3)
its effort to turn emails from static documents into dynamic, web page-like experiences.
Webpages, especially 'dynamic' webpages, are crap these days. Stuff constantly loading, moving, jumping around, not working correctly, etc. Please leave email alone...
Out of date (Score:2)
just what we need (Score:1)
You know, I was speaking to my colleagues just the other day, "I wish I could do more with my emails." I've always found macros in Word documents such a liberating tool in my life and now, Google has empowered me with AMP! Now I can combine my insipid, pointless emails will all kinds of useless, dynamic crap as well.
so they invented outlook forms (Score:2)
And me... (Score:2)
The year 2096. Email, which has long been waiting an overhaul, has become simple again with Gagglezon's "Simply Mail" which uses plain text to communicate without all the waste.
People want simple solutions to complex problems. (Score:2)
Yet again (Score:2)
"The promise of AMP for Email is that it'll turn basic messages into a surface for actually getting things done."
Yet another 'improvement' that nobody fuckin' wants or needs. This is just more dumbass hipster-driven bullshit that will be quietly forgotten about in a year... and then Google will drop it, just like they drop everything else that doesn't make them oodles of money.
Seems to undermine the whole point of e-mail (Score:2)
This is not a feature that I want!
TFA: "Marketers will love it." (Score:2)
Thanks, TFA. Those four words tell the rest of us everything we need to know.
Do Not Want.
Vulnerable and worthless. (Score:2)
It does offer a giant attack vector though.
And break the simple perfection of email.
Seriously, what's wrong with email? Nothing, that's what. Easy to implement, easy to use, and it's fast and lightweight, not bloated with unnecessary bandwidth-hogging "features".
...which is why I use... (Score:2)
Do not want! (Score:2)
See subject. I want my email to be flat, boring, and uninteresting. I guess, in a way, I am excited about all the new scams and viral outbreaks that this will precipitate, but for the most part, I think this is an absolutely terrible thing.
Prove me wrong. (You might be able to prove me wrong in theory, but come back in two years and let's see if your proof still stands. ROFLMAO)
Just what we need... (Score:2)
I'm so old that it was a joke on newbies that you could catch a virus by just reading an email.
Then Bill the Gates made that real, with HTML email. Now Google wants to add scripting into the email.
Great idea, goog... you have taken down all the "first, don't do evil" posters and shredded them, right?
And the people who want this? "I've got nothing at all to say, but let me give you me, singing and dancing!!!"