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Comment by _fat_santa | Hacker News Reader

I could find this useful with some types of transactional emails. I'm currently working on an app where a user submits their timesheet and an email is sent to a manager to approve the time. Right now the manager has to click "Review Time" in the email where they will then be kicked out to a portal I setup that lets them review the entries. With something like AMP I could embed all that logic in the actual email, letting the manager submit a review without having to leave that email.

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.

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Now you have an email that's useless when offline :(

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.

Oh no, the user has to press a button. Let's completely destroy privacy and complicate EVERYTHING just to save them that one click. Worth it.

Humans prefer to have barriers to completing a task removed. No clicks is much better than one click and privacy is almost completely dead. Privacy will slowly die unless there are major changes legally and culturally. It’s worthy to fight against the loss of privacy. I think it will be a losing fight though.

Meanwhile, let's make it impossible to click on a button to obtain support from Google when you need it (and are willing to pay for it).

Yeah but the same argument could be made for the web. Why build a react app that complicates everything instead of just a plain HTML site. The simple answer is use cases, if you're delivering a simple email with a notification then no you do not need something like this, but some will have a case where they do need to reach for something like this. It's no different than web or mobile development. If we shunned every piece of tech that had potentially nefarious uses cases then we would still be stuck in the stone age.

> Yeah but the same argument could be made for the web. Why build a react app that complicates everything instead of just a plain HTML site.

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"?

An extra couple clicks does not really seem like a major stretch, especially for anything that should be secure.

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.

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