AMP for email is a terrible idea
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
Also, technology companies have a real problem assigning appropriate value to maintenance tasks that just keep things stable and usable. I’ve had infrastructure responsibilities over the years and the hardest thing about it was that nobody really knows or cares how much trouble you put into having things work flawlessly for months or years on end. It was important to find lots of visible tasks to go along with the invisible ones. I guess you end up with things like 40 Google chat clients and “hey let’s screw with E-mail” when there isn’t enough promotion-worthy work left to do in those areas.
So everything is at cdn.example.com and if I change providers, it's just a dns record change and everything is ready, even if I want to just host my own content.
Good luck updating a site that used the latest and greatest build tools that are now depricated.
Fun thing: a lot of times I download the Javascript from a CDN because then I don't need build tools because it was already built for me on the CDN...
People focus too much on ship fast.
They get in trouble when the product becomes a success.
If you are an e-commerce site serving hundreds of images worldwide then CDNs make a tonne of sense.
If you just have a simple site or SaaS getting decent traffic, why add a failure point by including your choosen JS with a CDN. No one batts an eyelid when you add ten images to the homepage but somehow a single, much smaller JS file is too much extra load. It doesn't stand up to reason.
Anyway, I prefer my email to remain immutable after initial transmission. I don't need another Snapbookthingie...
Which reminds me, Google: You already hosed search results with your first... or second, or third, buzzzzzz... big social, dynamic (comments) push, Plus.
And almost nobody liked Buzz, nor the way you tried to shove it down our throats.
Are you really going to take another stab at sabotaging one of your successful products -- this time, Gmail?
You HAD a successful social platform: Reader. And you nuked it.
You want "social" and "changing content"? Bring back Reader.
Buy a clue.
Whenever a service or company purports to make something "engaging" and "interactive" you just know that useability and actual, tangible usefulness are going to go out the window in favour of marketer-driven choices.
We don't 'engage more' with your software/service because you changed everything to optimise for engagement and time spent, we engaged more because it took more time/steps to get the same thing done.
Arguably what we should be doing is optimising for less time spent on an app/service for the purposes of enabling a better/more efficient/more enjoyable experience by letting users get what they want to do done quickly and easily.
...doubt it.
I think it's a reasonable assumption that most people here are devs or interested in software/programming/etc. Marketers aren't going to be the ones who are actually interested in making better products, they're practically premature-optimisation-in-user-hostile-directions personified, so someone else has to at least propose these ideas.
>It all comes down a simple but very dangerous shift: the major websites of today's web are not built for the visitor, but as means of using her. Our visitor has become a data point, a customer profile, a potential lead -- a proverbial fly in the spider's web. In the guise of user-centered design, we're building an increasingly user-hostile web.
I'm not 100% sure if it's a vanity metric for Google or not.
...Google does have some of the greatest statistical minds in the world, just maybe not the best product/UX minds.
KPI's can be highly misleading when it's disconnected from raw UX. It's difficult to measure user emotional experience, especially when you have a monopoly on user attention with Google Search and total product lock-in with Gmail. When users don't have alternative options analytics stats can be deceiving.
And just because a user completes X task a hundred milliseconds faster it doesn't necessarily mean the UX was better. And just because the UX was made incrementally worse doesn't mean I'm going to use Google/Gmail any less. But enough of small cuts can build up into a serious wound.
Ubiquitous banner ads, "free" 56k if you use our browser and click links, cookie bonanza, link hijacking etc... have been part of the web since day one.
No they haven't. I definitely remember the web before those were common, and it was great.
And while yes, the web was hostile back then, we also thought about it as hostile. There's been a definite shift in how the web is presented. Back then, we taught "Don't put anything personal online, it's all shady." But now, we want users to give us everything they can, and we've changed the language to allow it. "It's OK for you to give this data to us. We're Google/Facebook/Twitter/etc. There's no way we'd be irresponsible with that data"
It's not like we've come up with some new, super-secure way to store that data. The web is even more shady nowadays, but we're training users not to think about it that way.
AMP is, to begin with, Google exerting its market power to extend its control over others’ content. Facebook is doing it, so Google has to.
Google has done a lot of exciting work on open standards like JSON-LD [0] and Microdata [1] to bring a better experience to both Google search results and Gmail. I love clicking the inline "Confirm subscription" button [2] instead of opening emails from Mailchimp and searching for a link. I'm not that scared of the future becoming locked into Google. I believe they'll improve upon and create better standards for emails. Most things aren't entirely altruistic, and that's OK. Gmail being an early adopter to these standards is a good enough reason for them.
[0]: https://developers.google.com/gmail/markup/reference/formats...
[1]: https://developers.google.com/gmail/markup/reference/formats...
[2]: https://developers.google.com/gmail/markup/reference/one-cli...
Maybe they’ve fixed the bizarre scrolling and overly sensitive links by now, but I see no reason to find out, because I don’t feel like I’m missing anything.
Only if that doesn't work pleasantly, then you get to complain about the browser not doing its job properly. (this remark aimed at some other replies in this subthread)
It's probably not hard at all, it's just that Google's priorities are currently at "fuck you" especially if you try to avoid being tracked.
These days, I actively avoid AMP links on Android. It's such a hideously buggy, functionality-disabling system on my phone that it's not worth loading those pages at any speed.
If I want to load a single page with dense content, view it without scrolling much, and close the tab, AMP makes my mobile experience better. If I want to do anything else, AMP on Android starts to interfere with basic functionality.
Which is a pretty sad story for a Google CDN on a Google browser on a Google OS.
So feel free to call it names and bring up feelings, but what I care about is the actual objective experience I'm getting.
As a developer and a content creator? I absolutely hate it. Not only is my content hosted outside of my control but they give them a visual weighting in Google search results. So now, if I want my content to have the best chance to be seen, I have to use AMP.
I wish they would have just made AMP a framework or build system that out spit out optimized web pages. Instead they force us to use their CDN which also has multiple trust issues.
Better they completely faked dns/cert in some wat and presented me copied content from their amp cache. I don’t check sources anyway.
Or are these ”engaging, interactive, and actionable email experiences.” more limited than the current web applications? If so, what are their limitations?
Also, I guess all clicks in those experiences will go through Google’s servers.
And therein lies the motivation. Why would all these Gmail users want to be clicking on web apps that aren't hosted on and monetized by Google, when they could be doing all these things inside Gmail?
That's the main thing I mind.
Really, the UI of webmail clients suck. The point of computing is automatization; there's shit ton of things that could be better integrated with each other in search, e-mail, calendaring, etc. But for that to be good, you'd have to own that integration. When a third party owns it, you become slave to that third party.
'Click here to download Thunderbird' is what my mind inserts after reading that.
They already do, when I click a link in my GMail (Android) app, and it opens in Firefox (Android), I can sometimes quickly see a Google redirection URL flit by before loading the actual page. They basically did a similar shitty trick to what they did to the Search result pages, pretending to be direct links but inserting a tracking redirect at the onbeforeunclick event or such.
Hey, btw anyone know of a nice Firefox Add-on or something that rewrites/stops the Google Search result links from redirecting at the last moment? I've been meaning to code up something like that myself, but I bet it already exists (and I'm mostly using DDG these days any way).
I agree with the article, email is email. But it points out something which is fundamentally a problem for the industry. Some software is done as in doesn't need to change any more.
That is a scary place since all those Gmail engineers need to do something so if it isn't adding new things to Gmail what will they do?
Interesting parallel in open source, Linux especially, when you have a subsystem that works well and is well understood by lots of people. Nothing to fix right? Well that would be boring. So we get things like systemd replacing the init subsystem and we get the unholy love child of netware and windows 'net' command replacing networking infrastructure management. Did they need changing? No, the previous systems did just fine. But what else is there to do?
But, people can't just do nothing and get paid. So, they will create the need. And now spend months to make it, fix it, get busy again.
This is absolutely a thing at Google IMHO. Remember the last major version of Google Maps, ran silky smooth on low end hardware, searches went where you expected, in and out no problem.
Then someone decided to try for glory and improve on perfection by re-engineering the entire thing. Now it sets the fans off in my macbook within a few seconds of appearing and they run for the duration, searches zoom out and show results 5 miles away on the other side of the major city I live in when I just want to see restaurants or coffee shops near me, constant back and forth jank from result lists to items.
Went from an app that was a complete joy to use to something I dread to interact with.
It's mostly about tracking and a form of "embrace, extend, extinguish". We're at the last end of the second phase now. Make no mistake, Google has followed through on the "extinguish" part enough in the past. See: Google Reader, and what they did to Usenet and the Deja archives.
90% of the industry isn't directly about software, rather other products that are helped by having some software around, and when it is done, it is done. Time to move along to other customer.
The underlying protocols (SMTP and IMAP) are decent, but the clients aren't. It still lacks usable end-to-end encryption found in many modern messaging protocols/apps. Outright spam is mostly solved, but marketing and other notification emails I accidentally or intentionally signed up for consume way too much mental bandwidth, even with supposedly intelligent email clients (at least the ones I've tried)
That said, AMP for email doesn't solve any of those problems either.
A lot of what it does definitely needed changing — although systemd implements that change suboptimally.
Take the logind concept:
In the past, Linux screensavers were simply a fullscreen window in front of everything else. They crashed? Your system unlocked.
With logind, you have one tiny separate daemon that spawns your original X session, and the screensaver. As long as the screensaver is active, that screensaver replaces the X sessions's display.
If the screensaver crashes, it gets restarted, or, if that fails, you get in a lovely TTY font "open a tty, login as your user, and type loginctl session-unlock".
And this is secure. If something fails, your session won't accidentally unlock.
Other features include an IPC protocol that allows per-message security — user A can send messsage type 1, but user B can only send message type 2 (although, did that verification language have to be JS? T_T)
Systemd is a lot of good intentions and ideas, turned into bad code.
AMP is one good idea (faster loading speeds) turned into not just bad code, but also lock-in and proprietary anticompetitive services.
There's no black, or white, only Greys on Greys.
(if only they would auto-fold after a fixed number of children, like Reddit, I might script that for myself one day)
This is really offtopic, but you seem to confuse KDE with systemd. There is a bit of KDE that tells you to use loginctl to tell KDE's display manager to unlock the session if KDE's screensaver doesn't work properly.
Before logind, the alternative was custom handling and detection of screensavers in your session, or simply it crashing back to the session.
Edit: to be clear, it’s not about the binary used to run the screensaver, it’s about the fact that it does not need to be a question of “all or nothing” and that a solution for this particular problem could have been adopted without replacing virtually every other component of the system services simultaneously.
logind is developed by systemd, but a separate binary. In fact, every systemd project is a separate binary, just developed by the same project. Systemd is as much a monolith as KDE is.
Second, this tiny little logind binary is separate from the screensaver. It does not contain the screensaver, nor the lock screen, nor does it link to them.
This tiny process spawns the session and screensaver, and simply switches between them based on a signal. It's the tiniest possible concept for handling this task.
In general, I'd prefer if you could be more specific about your criticism, e.g. how this separate tiny binary is a "kitchen sink" and the screensaver, which is entirely separate from logind and systemd, is "part of a megalith".
Some relief for frogs that make it out of the pot:
I do like he idea of encrypted-at-rest, and the desktop bridge seems like a decent solution for syncing locally, but not having search on mobile seems like it would be a major drawback for my use cases.
An app I have always wished for is something that would store an offline indexed archive of my email on mobile, protected by passphrase and independent of any provider.
As an aside, what’s the deal with Redbox? I’d never heard of them and $650/a for 25GB makes it seem like their pricing matrix hasn’t been updated since the 90s. The stock photography doesn’t help with that impression.
could you explain this a bit more? ive been routing my gmail to protonmail since i started using it but im slowly changing accounts from using gmail to protonmail as i go
They have a 5GB free-tier if you've got a custom domain. I've been a customer for years and very happy overall.
Barely no maintenance and I can add a prefix to all of my email addresses to easily blacklist anywhere that sells my email or unsubscribe links don't work for.
> In 1869, while doing experiments searching for the location of the soul, German physiologist Friedrich Goltz demonstrated that a frog that has had its brain removed will remain in slowly heated water, but an intact frog attempted to escape the water when it reached 25 °C.[1][5]
Ah, the whole brain then.
Pretty much the only task I ever want to complete from inside an email is “Unsubscribe”.
I wish clients would make it easier. Gmail does has an unsubscribe button for some emails. It would be cool if it recognized emails I consistently ignore and prompt me to unsubscribe from them.
email works and doesn't need fixing. It (nearly) transports more messages every day than is countable and just works. SNR - now that needs fixing and a good start would be enforcing plain text.
Marketers want to make money, and right now stuffing emails with images in favor of proper layout is the only easy way to do it.
Of course google also wants all of your email googling its way through their servers.
There is already a Gmail placement for AdWords ok the GDN. However for the most part, if I as a marketer send emails to my customers, I can be more or less certain they will get delivered if my deliverability is high.
What I see Google doing here is gradually exerting control until they tell brands "hey, you know those messages you used to send to customers for basically free? Now you need to pay a dynamic price we control in order to get any "organic" reach."
And just like that they will have turned one of the most valuable, scalable and cost effective marketing channels into another large revenue stream for themselves that gives them even more leverage over marketers.
Kinds of genius when you think about it.
That's already happened with GMail, hasn't it? The filters for Promotion, Social, and of course Spam already control what/where users see (and it'd be trivial for Google to charge a fee here based off visibility of Promotion-categorized messages).
It's still in a linear and usually legible way, of course, and I think it's arguably user-friendly if imperfect. Doing what facebook does with feed/status updates with email would be absolutely ludicrous, it would make GMail a ghost town overnight.
That is by design. Email is not an image viewer nor is it an HTML browser. It is a plain text medium.
It's an exaggerated version of the image-heavy email newsletters - these are obviously nice for the marketer, but the messages that I want to receive are not like that, they don't need this feature, it's only useful for those who want to steal my attention.
If marketers really need it, perhaps it could be a useful way to automatically forward any messages using this technology to spam.
Somehow I expect that GMail's search box will get a "usesAMP:yes" or "content:AMP" filter or something. It has a lot of filter keywords like this[0], undoubtedly they'll add it.
You can easily add a filter rule to automatically mark all messages matching a filter as "spam".
If enough people do that, they might get the message. (and probably just remove the search filter option, sigh)
[0] come to think of it, GMail's search is a delight exactly because almost still kind of works like how Google Web Search used to work back when it was still good, a mere decade ago ...
That's a feature, not a bug.
- user receives email with a link (text or image) that points to some AMP page
- user clicks on the link
Gmail: - renders the AMP page in-place, replacing email content
Non-gmail clients: - keep whatever "link click" behavior they currently have
This does not render interactive content in email automatically and requires a click, but that click is important because it
- signals the user's desire to interact with the content
- follows current email security expectations, e.g. does not load third party content (other than images) just by viewing the email
I direct a lot of things to email like social notifications just so everything comes to one place. I end up doing a lot of bounces off to various sites to "respond" with a Like, +1, Retweet, etc.
But like, an interactive email should be a whitelisted opt-in behavior. "Hey, I want my Twitter notifs to be interactive so I can reply and retweet without leaving my email, so let me enable the Twitter app in my email client."
As you pointed out, that violates user's expectations about what security vulnerabilities they are initiating when they open an email. Indeed, even lay users may sense that it just feels "wrong" for an email to act dynamically without anything being clicked.
I predict whatever Google launches will work in GMail, and GMail only.
Sure, other clients have their inconsistencies, but they’re nowhere near as bad as MSO, and they actually get fixed over time. Microsoft, on the other hand, persist in using a rather buggy engine from twenty years ago, unchanged (I don’t know that there haven’t been any functional changes or bug fixes since then, but if there have been they’re minor or obscure).
For a while in the late 90s / early 2000s we had RTF e-mail.
In 11 years of self-hosting my mail I've had one deliverability problem, which was when outlook.com users stopped receiving our mail. I wrote to outlook.com, and it was resolved within 24 hours. This is possibly because my server is located in a reputable, but relatively small, datacentre, and not on the likes of AWS.
I use the zen.spamhaus.org DNS blacklist to reject connections from spammers outright, and do SPF checks. These two methods alone (no Bayesian or similar filtering) mean I get about one spam message per two days on average, which I just delete.
I estimate that I spend about half an hour a month on keeping the server up-to-date etc.
I consider the downsides extremely small in comparison to the benefits of controlling your own email setup. I encourage anyone with even basic server administration skills to try it. Email is a fantastically decentralised system and we should take advantage of that.
Web is quite usable with or without AMP as long as you use some ad blockers.
As far as I understand, on Android, Google predominantly shows AMP pages on Chrome and not on Firefox (have not used other browsers to comment on. Will be great if someone chimes in on this).
This results in a good user experience for users of Chrome on Android.
But Android Chrome was made unusable by Google in the first place by not allowing extensions. So NoScript, AdBlockPlus, Ublock Origin etc will not work. So all the junk loads and you have an awful experience.
AMP comes in and saves the day :)
On Android Firefox, no such drama. I can just install Ublock Origin and have a great browsing experience what ever the site it is. Reader Mode is a bonus. (Though I have rarely used it).
What does it all say?
So that is what AMP is for? No wonder I've never seen the use.
Email doesn't belong to a company? Nice one. It belongs to Google and Microsoft.
And this kind of change signifies three things immediately:
1. Being terrible means it's likely to happen and not really stoppable. They've already thought about how many people won't like it and still decided to go for it.
2. They try for a long time to have this more interactive messaging experience. Thinking Google Wave and Google Plus here. They have not understood that Slack/Wechat have solved that in a much more elegant way already. So they try again and again. This one will also fail to produce the vision they have. Google simply doesn't get that Web 3.0 interactivity. For us it's okay, it just means at some points other companies will take Google's place, and it will become that old, annoying giant like IBM and Microsoft before them.
3. Touching Email in this way also means that they are becoming desparate. Maybe not about profit yet, but certainly about the visionary aspects of the company. Email is one of their core components. You don't F* with those unless you really feel desperate.
It is not at all about users. It's about survival. Therefore the arguments presented in the article aren't even close to being good. A good article would figure out why they are so desparate and suggest things that they could do in favor of their users that still will increase their survivability.
Buying Slack and integrating it with their office suite might just solve their problem. It will be super expensive but might bring them onto the next level. Just a quick, stupid suggestion as example for what the article should've been about.
I'm not holding my breath for something good to come out of this, though. This could just as easily be a terribly executed product. But I'll try to be an optimist, because what we have now is outright trash.
On the other hand, if HTML is excluded then the message gets through without scope for mischief.
If you're afraid of HTML, by all means please check your email from a sandboxed VM in the terminal. But some poor chump is still going to be toiling away to make the latest Pottery Barn newsletter look great on a Blackberry, so we'd might as well build better tools.
CSS can cause problems, too. @import could cause privacy issues, as could @font-face. If images are not pre-downloaded, @media and @page could reveal when you print a message and @supports could leak details about your mail client. `position: fixed` would need to be banned outright I'd think, if the message isn't sandboxed in an iframe.
HTML5 as a whole is designed for building applications, not for making pretty messages. You want to have a subset of HTML5, but not too strict of a subset. Some APIs (e.g., @font-face) probably can't be used as-is and need a replacement. And of course, it all needs to be somehow backwards-compatible.
* http://jdebp.eu./Proposals/gnksoa-mua.html#NoAutoFetchExtern...
1. Build a product everybody hates and shove it down their throats.
2. Find an existing product people love and fuck it up or kill it.
How not to get promoted at Google (or anywhere else):
1. Build a product people hate and quietly let it die.
2. Do absolutely nothing to an existing product that works well that people love.
If they do wield a similar influence because of the market share of Gmail, hopefully somebody challenges that under antitrust or some other consumer protection basis. Email doesn't need walled gardens. That's back to the AOL days. "You've got AMP mail!"
While I don't see the security issue at a machine level being an issue since this will be done through canvas. I do see an issue with privacy. Its still JavaScript powering that fancy display. Which means JavaScript can write and read cookies and session values. JS can possibly do other bad things on your machine.
I wish my email would just stay email. Let the social networks do the fancy stuff. That's what they're for. Google could always go back a retool Google Plus. Let publishers do AMP mini-sites there.
How is this bad?
I do not understand the hate?
If you do not like the product then move on.
I can see this working well on a mobile devices, not sure how it will work on other platforms, but I'm definitely open to giving it a shot.
The best part about this is if I don't like it I can always switch.
I don't want my email client to be part of such a system. If I want to follow the advice of "if you do not like the product then move on", then it's not sufficient for me to simply not use this feature in messages I send, this requires that messages I receive don't/can't use this feature.
Oh, the hate is just the new version of the ASCII ribbon against HTML email...
I wish they implemented this as a separate MIME type so emails could specify multi-part messages with text/plain, text/html and a text/amp (just for gmail).
i think that AMP is a way to make up for the fact that Chrome will be blocking ads tomorrow. Google has to do something to give publishers a way to reach people and make money otherwise publishers will begin to start charging Google in some way or take their business else where.
When you open an email, a publisher has your direct attention and being able to interact with you in a two way direction is HUGE.
The last thing Google needs to do these days is copy Facebook. Almost everything Facebook has done in the past few years has pushed users away from the platform.
Also, if Google's goal with AMP really was to "make the web faster" how exactly will integrating AMP web pages into email make email faster? Seems to me like it would make email slower...? (at least if we discount marketing spam).
Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerated_Mobile_Pages ): They are a competing technology with Facebook's Instant Articles that restricts the page from doing practically anything that isn't performance-minded up-front. That means very little loading, and all data calls are async. That means no document.write or other blocking calls that would prevent the page from loading. As culled from the wiki article and the amp project site, pages in AMP load in a second or less and consume very little data, making them optimal for mobile devices.
Would it be possible to make a filter in FastMail that automatically deletes these emails? I can imagine spammers would love to send “You need an AMP client to view this email, click here”. Plus the point about privacy above.
Edit: I’d want it to send a reply, as I can imagine anyone with a Gmail account might be blocked from sending me an email. Possibly any companies on the AMP bandwagon.
This might be the push I need to get round to writing an IMAP gateway that strips HTML and only serves text/plain to my email client. I don’t need more HTML and tracking bullshit in my emails.
Well, I like email. It does exactly what I need it to do. It doesn't have the pressures of chat or phone calls, and has the versatility to do all kinds of useful things. Best of all, it can't be broken by a single company and a stupid decision.
I also like forks, but I'm usually not telling people how great forks are. That's what the article says.
I don't want this new feature and am glad I moved away from gmail, but I think the author is mistaken if they think people don't want this. Some people don't want to leave their gmail app to click one box on a now slowly loading web page full of content/ads they don't care about. I procrastinate on some mail because I don't immediately feel like dealing with the context switch. Then the mail gets buried by others and I forget. I'm ok with that mode of operation and I can also see a lot of people not being ok with and being delighted by AMP in gmail.
>> allowing “engaging, interactive, and actionable email experiences.”
I immediately think advertisements.
If AMP ends up being natively supported inside your gmail inbox, then Microsoft will have no choice to support it also, lest people jump ship from Outlook.com to gmail. Once Microsoft add AMP support to Outlook.com, then they'll turn their attention to the Outlook client, and enable AMP there too.
Once that happens, AMP-Email will be a standard, and there will be no stopping it.
For me, if that happens, I'll be turning back on the 'plain text email only' option in my mail client.
> I'll be turning back on the 'plain text email only' option > in my mail client.
I am with you on that. I would even go one step further. I would enable this option to only show pure text content. And to autorespond to emails without pure text with a message:
"In the spirit of the web. And in the spirit of AMP power emails (Google telling you, that these are faster) I only accept pure text emails. These are the fastest ones to send, deliver and consume.
Please, in the future refrain from sending me bloated code. And if you feel the need to include images - use the age old attachment function."
That's legally risky for Google. They're not protected by an EULA if their outgoing email has hostile code and hits a non-Google customer.
(Sometimes the idiots start replying to the automated emails!)
I really wish there was a better way to bridge that gap. I usually turn on conversation view (we use Outlook), to group all of the emails via ticket, pull request, ect. But, what I really want is my email client to just tell me what changed, and use an anchor hyperlink to take me there in the ticket, pull request, ect.
I think it's worth experimenting with viewing these tickets inside of an email client, but I'm not sure if I'd like that or not.
I really dislike ads or using my CPU cycles to mine bitcoins for unrelated entities (cough cough Salon).
Am I stealing the information these entities provide for free on open Internet connections? Maybe. I don't really care though. I also benefit similarly by gut bacteria processing my food, and also don't want them taking their "fair" share of my life by ending up in places they don't belong. This particular analogy is, of course, open for expansion.
I agree with the distinction, but I believe that websites & email belong on the same side of the moat. Websites are meant to say things and applications are meant to interact with things.
Only non-standard emails won't work with POP3 or IMAP protocols. In those cases you need to use their specific program/protocols, yes. It seems Tutanota falls in this category, as does ProtonMail.
Except forks are fine and e-mails are a dumpster fire.
That's not surprising, but what exactly is broken about emails? And of those problems, which can't be fixed without breaking backwards-compatibility?
I've heard there are problems with verifiability, for example. Permitting backward-compatibility in security seems like you'd end up with the old-SSL problem.
I don't see a problem here.
Use AMP HTML in every email to display a message about how AMP is toxic to the open web. Only AMP clients will see it.
IMO it's already ridiculous the GMail app never even cached (a large) part of your messages on your device so you can use it offline.
Given the decline of everything Google lately, I can actually see it happening. But going for full profits instead of what made them good so far, will just be one of the final nails in the coffin.
Sincerely,
Someone who, when seeing something for free, reaches for his pistol.
It seems almost comical. On the one hand, we are constantly told that email is losing out to modern instant messaging avenues for communication. On this hand, the plan for competing is to try and make it more heavy weight? Reminds me of when Wave supposedly was going to remake email.
I suspect someday I'll just be a luddite, as mentioned in another thread. I really hope this is not that day.
FastMail does an excellent job hanging on real standards, and so supporting these Gmail-specific features requires that the standards themselves, support such things.
LO
The basic plan costs 1€/month to have 3 email addresses that always go to the same place. They have something that I can't live without anymore: Disposable email addresses. On the basic plan you can have up to 11 disposable email addresses to sign up on services without the worry of spam or that they share your email address with third parties.
Oh look an AMP url ... Sigh.
FTFY. I cannot wait for this cancer to die off. For now, I avoid anything by Google as much I can.
1. Gmail is a channel that Google has under monetized for a decade. This is an opportunity for them to extract value from the said channel. If you're allergic to Google offering free services that use your data for advertising, go pay for email. Google isn't a charity and you aren't entitled to a Gmail of your choosing.
2. Apple is a prime example of successfully monetizing a "channel". They sell you hardware that apparently you own, but cannot run apps that haven't received Apple's blessing. Even their fucking charging port is proprietary (lighting) and to build an accessory compliant with iPhones, one has to pay an Apple tax of $7/unit that can easily be avoided with open standards such as uUSB. Never in the history of computing has your hardware required the manufacturer's blessing to run apps. Why do I mention this? Because an overwhelming majority of those foaming at the mouth at AMP are doing so on their iPhones and iPads - I hope the irony isn't lost on you folks.
3. If you find Apple's practices more abhorrent than AMP and consistently oppose both - congratulations, you're a minority whose reasoning isn't clouded by brand jingoism
4. If you called bullshit on Google because a) mobile pages can be fast(er) even without AMP and b) JavaScript was restricted within email for security, then your opposition to this proposal is the most accurate.
Cheers
At any rate you choose to buy into Apple ecosystem. A big email provider changing how email works is not the same thing. For the record I host my own email server and use mutt as my main email client. The only Apple device I own is an old pre-iphone iPod.
If Google changes the expectations of email users everywhere then it won't be long until you end up with a broken experience if you don't support AMP email out of the box. Exactly what happened with HTML email: it's not rare these days to receive a multipart/alternative email where the plain text version is simply "see HTML". If AMP mail becomes mainstream it'll be like this but worse. Soon you'll have an HTML page that will tell you to "see AMP content".
I don't know if it's completely on purpose but that's by the book "embrace, extend and extinguish" by Google there.
I mean, there's truth to the idea that Google have more sway when it comes to trends on the internet, but when you say that a "a big email provider changing how email works", Apple could easily be the big email provider in that sentence
Just wanted to say that you can read HTML emails in Mutt by having a browser, like Links2 or Lynx, do the formatting.
https://www.marksanborn.net/howto/reading-html-email-with-mu...
Yes and if I don't, too bad. I just can't iMessage the rest of my family who did.
I disagree. Gmail brought Google millions of customers. It's all about the ecosystem that they are building, which helps them retain customers. If you use Gmail, than there is higher chance that you will use Google Drive than competition. Another example of this is Google Keep. There is no reason for them to have free notes app, other than making you use more Google products.
Apple sells hardware and is not a monopoly, so if their customers are happy with their choice then good for them.
On the other hand Google is a monopoly, so a lot of people are not ok with them abusing their position to hijack the web (that they already “own”) and email.
Edit: typo
I provide paid email services for my clients, they can use Gmail if they want, or not. But for SEO, it's Google all the way down...
No, you'll get down voted for the way you are saying it. There's a difference, and it's an important one.
Cheers
... and don't ever write emails to anyone who uses GMail. And tell all your friends who use GMail they shouldn't write emails to you.
Yes, email is such an important tool that it would make sense for all of us to pay for it. That said, the big internet companies trained millions of users to expect everything for free on the internet (intentionally or not). Many people seriously think "if it is on the internet, it should be free - I am paying for my internet connection, aren't I?". If you don't believe me, try talking to a non-HN, non-tech-savvy person about it.
The fault is on these companies as much as the users. It would take a big change in mindset to make non-advertising models work in consumer world
This is part of the reason for why I've always used a vanity domain for e-mail that uses Gmail as a backend. I've used Gmail since beta invites were scarse, but there are a variety of reasons for why I won't trust any given e-mail provider permanently. The fact that most of them are free is just one, albeit an important one.
I'm quite a bit uneasy with Google lately but it's not feasible for me to move to another e-mail provider because my user account on many other websites is tied to my Gmail account and not all websites support e-mail changing.
At this point, I would argue that Gmail reached a public infrastructure status and it's not acceptable of Google to take actions without public consent.
It is perfectly acceptable if Google decides to charge for de services as it will happen with any public infrastructure that has running costs but it's not acceptable for Google to force people into situations or engineer their behavior just because provides the service free of charge.
For example, in my country, the electricity is generated by private for-profit corporations. However it would not be acceptable if these corporations start changing the voltage of the frequency of the electricity and force people to use devices designed specifically for that electricity network.
I don't remember Google forcing me into using Gmail but I also don't remember anyone forcing Google to provide an e-mail service. They did a great job, it revolutionized e-mail but they did it to compete with Microsoft and Yahoo, thus for profit(back in the day everyone was using Hotmail or Yahoo).
I did not know we were a uniform, homogeneous crowd...
But _publishers_ are pressured to support AMP because Google, the most popular search engine by far, prioritizes AMP results. If they do anything with AMP they can likely have their way. And the same will likely apply for email.
Yay! I won something on the internet today!
2. I use an iPhone, but it's only because I believe that Apple respects my privacy more than Google does with Android. I don't really like using an Apple device, because some of the reasons you mentioned. But I value my privacy over those things.
3. I consistenly opposes both and I really hope that I am not in the minority.
4. Yes. Thank you.
The problem is that Gmail is the most prominent e-mail provider and at the same time they make it difficult for other e-mail providers to operate, especially small ones. Gmail's spam detection is totally opaque and you can't do much if your mail lands in junk folder. For this single reason Google is no longer in a position when you can cut them some slack for anything related to Gmail.
Regardless, many of the disagreements with you seem to have stopped reading at (2). I am completely aware of the irony of my using Google devices while simultaneously criticizing them for their shitty practices. If you were to point that out to me I'd agree with you. Pointing that out to me isn't a personal attack, it's a statement of the facts of human nature: we are all hypocrites.
I can honestly see why AMP is a clever idea from a technical standpoint. Heck, if Google made the switch while keeping the same look and feel (minus the dynamic content), I doubt most people would notice beyond "Gmail somehow got faster."
Just as a reminder for everyone (and I appreciate that the parent comment does not directly claim that this is the case), Google claims not scan or read your emails in Gmail to show you ads, nor to sell your information to advertisers.
Source: https://support.google.com/mail/answer/6603?hl=en
Just thought I'd point that out before the FUD/tin-foil kicks in too much :)
Which is true. It's equally true that people can point out if changes Google make are problematic for users.
No hypocrisy required.
Except for every game console that has existed since the early 80s.
http://atariage.com/forums/topic/227899-atari-v-coleco-lawsu...
I’m pretty okay with google substituting ssl/dns/content even for their cash flow, I don’t care until they turn my browser into common-standards web crap. It turns safari into chrome, which I tested on an expensive sony sevice and couldn’t stand any more than two days.
Edit: I know that my “don’t care” is not popular among hn users, but it resembles regular non-tech folks thinking — amp is that thing on some sites that annoys you when you scroll and share links. 98% of us really don’t care and notice inconvenience only.
>I'll get down voted for saying this
Well don't mind if I do. (read the guidelines friend, this kind of crap is specifically frowned upon).
> Google isn't a charity and you aren't entitled to a Gmail of your choosing.
This is a pet peeve of mine. What does this mean? That you can't force to charge their ways? Yeah, maybe you can't. Doesn't mean you're not allowed to make criticism? If course not. The argument "they're a private company therefore they do what they please" is a facile but invalid way to shut down criticism.
>You can't complain about Google because Apple does other unrelated bad stuff.
Well and you can't complain about Apple because Monsanto does even worse stuff and I don't see you mentioning then. Classic whataboutism.
In other words, if you really wanted to do constructive criticism you would have (1) presented your arguments clearly instead of playing the victim in your very first sentence, and (2) you would have limited yourself to the facts of the matter and not to external stuff (which you only kinda did in your 4th point).
Not because they're all nice and charitable.
But because Google sometimes sucks at monetizing things.
As a marketer emails are really limited. This opens up possibility of higher engagement and less friction for what you want Gmail customers to do. I work for a loan company - get a rate quote IN YOUR EMAIL! Customer saves time and I just cut 2 steps out of our funnel.
The required coding and browser compatibility scare me a bit though. Nothing to piss off consumers than an email that doesnt work as promised.
I dont want AMP. In fact, I want emails to go the other way. It already annoys me that email marketers can track whether i have read their email or not.
Do you actually like watching advertising, and getting hundreds of spam and impossible-to-unsubscribe marketing emails every day?
If not, why do you think your users will?
There's nothing good in marketing. It doesn't help the ability of users to buy products (if the goal is that the user buys the best product for the lowest price, the best tool for that would be providing more independent comparable reviews, and better price comparison search), and it certainly doesn't help the user get to the content they want (which is not the ad).
The only reason users ever subscribe to marketing content are (a) to figure out when sales are, snd (b) coupons. Actually sell everything at a better price all year round, improve price comparison engines, and you won't need any of that anymore. The net benefit for society is negative.
I think they clearly know that users hate advertising but this is not their concern, more important is if the advertising increase the sales/profit.
You have to see it from their point of view.
I hate advertisement too but if I'm a marketer I would gladly spam users all day long if it works.
My fear is this is where this is heading.
This is a feature, not a bug.
What is currently stopping you from sending rate quotes in email nowadays? AFAICT, rate quotes are able to be represented via plaintext.
For example, I would never use a centralized, proprietary platform for these services. Some folks don't care, but they may want it to work on <insert latest device fad here>. Even if it works on that device, it will likely need to comply with local regulations around the world, each with their own requirements.
If we (humans) can't even get a single, agree on unified service for something 'simple' like web search, what makes you think we'll ever converge on dozens of mediums/services/protocols?
For phone calls you have telephones, again hand me your phone number and I will call you.
Video is annoying, it would be nice to bypass Skype/Google Hangouts etc.
On a more serious note, if the idea of AMP is so bad as many people attest. How is that the "bad idea" passed over so many people at a company that praises itself of hiring some of the most smartest people in the field? Hyperbole, the author of this article is just generalizing. Maybe AMP for email works for some people, making it a good idea for them.
AMP is good for Google, and secondarily maybe also good for some subset of people who care more about short-term benefits on slow connections than the long-term damage to the open web.
AMP for email is good for Google alone.
The fact that Google produced AMP played a nontrivial part in me rejecting their job offer - I didn't want my work to be judged by the engineering standards of an organization that continues to staff and promote AMP.
Maybe they don't actually hire the smartest people in the field, or maybe the smart people they hire do not have their users' best interests in mind.
Maybe because they are oblivious to the big difference between being a good developer, being generally smart, and being a decent person? These really are entirely different things, and selecting for the former would not necessarily give you the latter. And I very much doubt that they were selecting for the last one at all lately. If ever.