Gmail Dynamic Email (a.k.a. AMP for Email)
support.google.com
support.google.com
All this screams to me is that google has way too much power in email to be able to implement something like this.
On the one hand we have some companies trying to block things like tracker pixels and other static images for tracking purposes.
Then we have google saying "lets make emails dynamic" and just making it easier to track.
I hope no other email provider adds support for this. Email needs to remain static and platform agnostic.
Speaking of which, when you access Gmail via IMAP, Google replaces every URL in HTML email with a tracking link, having you go through their servers first before being redirected to where you actually want to go.
Does this replacement occurs for free Gmail accounts ?
I'm counting on Google Workspace customers much larger than me to keep gmail in line.
I just checked and though click-and-hold shows the real link, if I tap to open, it actually opens "https://www.google.com/url?q=<original link>" in my browser.
EDIT: This happens for both Workspace and normal "free" accounts.
I'd love for a Firefox Android extension to remove this, alas it doesn't seem to have been 'blessed by Mozilla' to be available on mobile.
This shouldn't even be necessary. I get that Google already has the link cause it's in Gmail.
The problem with all of this is none of it will work because of platform support. Like you said support for AMP Emails is limited to Gmail and maybe a handful of other clients. Part of me wishes that AMP Emails were an actual standard rather than a "standard" that google created to help itself. And with only Gmail really having support, you know this will only ever get used in marketing shenanigans and to more deeply track you.
Yes. Yes!! Exactly the same argument can be made about the web. Why is the answer to this "let's do the same in email" and not "why don't we work to reduce overengineering and complexity"?
Worst case do what many things I have seen do, the act of clicking the button opens a web page that simply states "thank you for doing X". That way regardless of what platform they click it form, it works.
I am assuming you are already building the functionality into a portal that managers can go to and see a list of everyone, so why replicate that functionality in email?
Wanting to have this functionality in email feels like a severe case off over engineering for things we have been doing for a very long time.
There are very few benefits to users but all the benefits for google. This keeps people in Google for longer. That is not something we should accept. Giving google more control.
The ancient way would be, just embedding the spreadsheet in the email, which can be done because html is supported, and then accepting some replies, like "LGTM" to approve right away, or "you need to adjust X" as the review comments.
Although there's problems beyond just being able to handle the email response.
Today is that email is insecure. There's a big push for e2e encryption on instant messaging, but not on email, even while it faces the same problem of privacy not being a default.
And a bigger problem in my mind is that people working on wealthier countries probably have had almost permanent internet access while working for the last 10yr. This might make offline a non-goal for most products/services.
The biggest win from using email today might be how well it works asynchronously.
I already make sure to never allow my mailreader to render HTML or resolve links anyway, though, for security reasons. So I guess this won't affect me any.
Unless something mandatory or highly desirable comes to depend on it. This is what needs to not happen. A bit like banks on smartphones.
About banks and smartphones, it's a tangent but by chance my bank haven't managed to force us to have a smartphone to deal with it so far. They are trying hard though.
For months they have been displaying on web transactions that paying on the web would require the app in a few weeks. Now they just say passive-agressively that it would have been easier with the app because I would not have to type the second code we have to enter without it (except I actually saw how it works with the app and it's not even much more convenient).
I guess we are enough users to have not installed the app.
And indeed, at this point nothing in my life requires a smartphone. It's merely convenient for directions and for showing QR Codes to whatever machine which wants to see some in transport networks.
While the mono culture of a Chromium driven web is a huge problem, it's not the same as the IE problem.
The biggest mistake IMO was the Firefox open source project focusing on building a browser as opposed to a web engine.
Even nodejs was created on Chromium (and the difficulty of building node on Gecko was the primary reason why MS chose Chromium over Gecko).
I suspect if we want to avoid a Chromium monoculture, we will need a similar split like the Netscape > Firefox one, where someone pulls out the Gecko rendering engine and builds an open source product/business on top of it.
No. There's no "tremendous amount of control". You're still ~100% reliant on Chrome to produce all the features.
> where someone pulls out the Gecko rendering engine and builds an open source product/business on top of it.
What would be that business? Browsers are free.
On top of that: you've ripped out the rendering engine. Now what? You still have to update it, and develop it, and keep up with the rest of the industry.
https://www.howtogeek.com/427457/how-to-disable-dynamic-emai...
It's too bad that mail clients encourage people to write HTML email by default. The default should be plain text, or perhaps better yet, text/markdown but without links as image sources.
That was my first thought. Just requires one vulnerability, and boom everyone who has a gmail account is at risk
This could change that of course but the emails don't have information in them because of Gmail.
Senders are already going out of their way to ruin the user experience just to stop Gmail slurping up all the information.
Also remember when you could respond to social network messages via email? It was so useful! You don't even see the content anymore haha (that one's almost definitely to draw you back to the site tho)
One big part of raising this mysterious and possibly just a myth "quality score" is to increase your emails open rates and especially your click-to-open rate. Basically, the more people you get to open your email and then to click through to your website, the better that Google will think your emails are performing and the more likely they are to appear in the inbox in the future.
Plus, clicking through an email provides tracking information not only to Google, but also to the site you clicked through to, which helps them with their marketing campaigns or whatever else they are doing with their tracking info.
There is an entire pseudo-science that email marketing people use in attempts to increase deliverability and "inboxing" in Gmail and a lot of it just comes down to "get more people to click through to your website", and it does appear to help, at least anecdotally.
So I'm not sure if there is such a thing as a "quality score", but there certainly is a machine learning black box.
https://daringfireball.net/linked/2020/06/01/product-info-in...
E: I should have acknowledged the rest of your post, sorry! I did read it, I've just got nothing to add as it's new information to me, thank you for the info! Didn't mean to come across as dismissive there! :)
That's off the top of my head...
The AMP’s schtick is to make emails into widgets. It’s not so much that it’s bad (potentially evil, though), but it makes email into a completely different thing.
In my mind first it’s AMP, then Android Instant Apps or something, and before you know it you have DRM in your emails.
The “Supersedes:” header already exists.
"How is that possible, it is 9am and my flight is at 10am?"
"No sir, your flight was at 8am"
Checking your email, you see 8am and you have questions about your sanity
The problem is cases of where you would want to update an email after it is sent is few and far between.
I think the idea is good but the semantics aren't aligned: if a "thing" is to be modified, it can't be an email. There is too much history ingrained about emails being static and updates appearing in another email. But maybe this can open up a new form of collaboration that never mentions the word "email" but uses SMTP/IMAP as a transport. I'm thinking about what Deltachat is doing and it's using the protocols to transport "metadata" information that is not to be read directly by users. They even created embedded apps to further the capabilities and give users a way to do much more than just exchanging messages: https://webxdc.org/
All in all there is a place for self-modifiable documents with updates transported via SMTP, but the semantics need to be very clear. And it's hard to believe Google and follow it to be a good steward for an open, beneficial protocol and idea.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25113482
> Modern DKIM deployments are problematic because they incentivize a specific kind of crime: theft of private emails for use in public blackmail and extortion campaigns.
Use FOSS mail clients, using standard protocols, with IMAP, POP3 and SMTP servers.
I would already be satisfied with email clients supporting Markdown, but then it couldn't fully replace HTML in terms of flexibility. It'd just be a nicer middle ground between plain text and HTML.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis...
I think email (and by extension, mail) is traditionally static because the medium never allowed for dynamic updates. I don't see the harm in trying to improve upon that. If a solution is found that allows for full transparency of those updates with sufficient privacy, why not?
Should email stay the same as it has been for another 50 years? I don't think it will.
If they had worked on addressing some of those shortcomings alongside the launch of Amp for email, it would have gone a long way to promoting adoption.
But maybe that's not an evolution of email but in direct contradiction to it. Maybe it's something entirely different that is needed ... an industry standard for notifications.
Unfortunately the current landscape of the market is not favorable to create proper industry standards anymore like it used to, as all the big players feel that they have no need to co-work anymore to solve a cross-industry problem.
I have received dynamic email a couple of times over the last couple of years and each time it has been a pleasant experience. For example my local mechanic sent a reminder that it was time for my vehicle inspection and my oil change. I was able to schedule my appointment for these directly from the email without having my email reading interrupted by having to switch windows or tabs.
But it is what it is. The main problem with amp for emails is that email marketers don't have the time to make them. We're always excited when somebody get something out that's awesome, but it stays at that.
We're back at our day to day operations. Unfortunately amp is staying in the "Important, but not urgent" category for a few years now.
Look at this email for example: https://reallygoodemails.com/emails/discover-more-with-the-b...
If take email marketing to be a legit line of business, you might like this feature. But your assumption would be invalid. Email marketing is detrimental to society. It's the not-illegal spam. Don't market to us.
Are you having a bad day my man? Hope it gets better.
From where this community is standing, this is a big opportunity to work on fun projects. Email development is specific a little bit, but it's greatly enjoyable for many.
Whether it's worth the risks, hmm, maybe, maybe not, I've seen a few great arguments in this thread.
Actually, from this thread, I feel this type of email I mentioned MIGHT be acceptable in a sense. The ones where you can do a functional thing from email, like accept a calendar event are a different story.
But we're a long way from having amp as a standard practice.
It has a large graphic and extremely low information density, and doesn't actually provide much value. It's just an ad. And an ad that obviously comes with tracking.
I'm certainly not the target demo for that email, but if the marketing emails I get that are intended for my demo were like that, I'd consider them to be spam.
Because you're working in marketing, and you literally don't care about people. People to you are just money making machines that you need to squeeze to get that sweet ROI, OKRs, hockey stick graphs on "user aquisitions", increased ARPU and other crap.
I've yet to remember a single marketing crap in my inbox I didn't delete immediately upon receiving.
And how could there be no privacy concerns? At a minimum, a server somewhere is going to be notified every time you open the email, so it can check for updates.