
AMP for email is a terrible idea - coloneltcb
https://techcrunch.com/2018/02/13/amp-for-email-is-a-terrible-idea/
======
makecheck
Nothing says “we’re listening to your concerns about AMP” like rolling it out
further to interfere with a function that is even less suited for AMP.

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.

~~~
ehnto
Part of why I don't advocate for CDNs when you don't need them is because I
want to build robust sites that work for years untouched. For timespans over a
year, anything not on your server is brittle. Oops, CDN changed its URL/didn't
update their ssl ciphers/went bust and shut down completely and now {js-
framework}/{css-library} is missing and my site is broken. What an
unforeseeable circumstance!

~~~
jjeaff
That's why I like to map one of my own subdomains to the cdn service.

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.

~~~
y03a
Doesn't that kill the possibility that a visitor will already have common
content cached when visiting your site for the first time? I know that's not
the only reason to use a CDN, but it's a pretty big one.

~~~
vanadium
In my experience, the variety of specific versions of libraries sites are
locked to dilutes that performance benefit. Just look at a cross-sampling of
sites calling jQuery or <insert your favorite library or framework here>.

In theory, the maximum benefit of a CDN only comes if everyone is on 1) the
same version or, similar but different, 2) an evergreen version. And the
latter is a big red neon sign screaming "DANGER".

~~~
tripzilch
And the parts that everyone is on, became standardized in the browser:
document.querySelector, CSS animations, async stuff, etc.

------
FridgeSeal
" “modernize” email, allowing “engaging, interactive, and actionable email
experiences.” "

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.

~~~
colordrops
You are making a mistake in thinking you are the customer. You are the
product.

~~~
chx
When using gsuite, I am the customer.

~~~
cdolan
I have always wondered - is there someone you can chat with or call for
GSuite?

~~~
JCharante
Yes. It was my first and only call with Google tech support. Noticeably
outsourced, but competent after escalation.

~~~
username223
> competent after escalation.

Was escalation as simple as "I would like to speak to a supervisor, please,"
or was there a more complicated incantation?

~~~
berbec
I believe the phrase you're looking for is "Klaatu barada nikto!"

~~~
gowld
I said "necktie" and now my computer has daemons.

~~~
tripzilch
Hail to the king, baby!

------
CapacitorSet
Related reading: _Against an increasingly user-hostile Web_ ,
[https://www.neustadt.fr/essays/against-a-user-hostile-
web/](https://www.neustadt.fr/essays/against-a-user-hostile-web/)

>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.

~~~
AndrewKemendo
I remember reading that article and thinking that the author either isn't old
enough to remember the 90s web or has memory loss about how hostile it was to
the user.

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.

~~~
CaptSpify
> 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.

------
tejasmanohar

      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.
    

As a consumer, I actually love AMP. Everytime I click a news link on mobile
and am taken to AMP, I'm relieved to be free from the extremely distracting
original websites.

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...](https://developers.google.com/gmail/markup/reference/formats/json-
ld)

[1]:
[https://developers.google.com/gmail/markup/reference/formats...](https://developers.google.com/gmail/markup/reference/formats/microdata)

[2]: [https://developers.google.com/gmail/markup/reference/one-
cli...](https://developers.google.com/gmail/markup/reference/one-click-action)

~~~
bdhess
We have the exact opposite opinion then. I moved to DuckDuckGo on iOS because
I thought the AMP formatted Google search results were so user-hostile.

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.

~~~
kyrra
I know the scrolling issues we're bugs in webkit. Google (I believe) started
to employ a webkit dev to fix the problems.

~~~
ComputerGuru
No, not really. Most UX issues with AMP on Safari rather stem from the
approach Google has taken with the html. For instance, it’s not a WebKit bug
that tapping the top of the screen on an AMP page does not scroll to top -
something that works on virtually all other webpages.

~~~
kyrra
The tapping top of screen hasn't been fixed, as it likely is hard to do.

As for other work on scrolling:

Person contracted to fix some webkit issues: [http://frederic-wang.fr/amp-and-
igalia-working-together-to-i...](http://frederic-wang.fr/amp-and-igalia-
working-together-to-improve-the-web-platform.html)

HN discussion made some news about scrolling changes made due to AMP's bug
reports: [https://www.macrumors.com/2017/05/22/scrolling-changes-
comin...](https://www.macrumors.com/2017/05/22/scrolling-changes-coming-to-
mobile-safari/)

~~~
ComputerGuru
AMP scrolling is still broken. I don’t see why it needs to touch the scroll
behavior at all. Plain html is both fast and scrolls naturally. It doesn’t
break mobile safari. I don’t get why Google needed to render AMP on such a way
that they need to try hard to emulate native scroll behavior (still getting it
wrong, previously it was too fast and now it’s a smidge too slow) instead of
just using the native behavior.

------
Someone
Everybody had a computer that could run any program, but used only their web
browser, so they made the web browser pretend to be any program, but then
everybody had a web browser that could run any program, but used only webmail,
so they made webmail pretend to be any program? Where does that end?

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.

~~~
berbec
At Google, we feel email security is a top priority. That is why the new AMP-
enabled GMail runs on a Go interpreter, in a walled Java-based virtual
machine, inside Chrome, installed the OS of your choice.

~~~
bballer
Meaning no Chrome, no AMP based emails? Sounds good to me!

------
ChuckMcM
Because they didn't internalize the feedback from Wave well enough I guess. /s

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?

~~~
kuschku
I have to disagree on the topic of systemd.

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)

~~~
erikb
This thread here is obviously the wrong place to roll out the systemd
discussion again.

~~~
kuschku
That's a good point, it's just sad to see people directly dismiss it.

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.

------
jacquesm
Poor frogs. The water temp just got upped a couple of degrees. Too late to
jump out or not just yet?

Some relief for frogs that make it out of the pot:

[https://mailinabox.email/](https://mailinabox.email/)

[https://redmail.com/](https://redmail.com/)

[https://protonmail.com/](https://protonmail.com/)

[https://www.fastmail.com/](https://www.fastmail.com/)

~~~
Qwertious
Frogs will jump out of slowly-heating pots. Unless they're lobotomized in a
certain specific way, which was the experiment that created the popular myth.

~~~
jacquesm
Only on HN...

~~~
Qwertious
I also point this out whenever someone mentions the frog analogy on reddit.
So, also on reddit.

~~~
jacquesm
Maybe you should try to contribute to the discussion instead of trying to
derail it with trivia? Especially if that's something you do repeatedly.

~~~
vntok
Maybe you should have selected a better analogy instead of a flawed one?

------
tlrobinson
> “For example, imagine you could complete tasks directly in email.”

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.

~~~
DogOfTheGaps
The Inbox App for Android does this.

------
gerdesj
Thank goodness that a bunch of clever kids are going to replace boring old
SMTP n MTAs n MUAs and stuff with this bollocks:
[https://www.ampproject.org/](https://www.ampproject.org/) 8)

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.

~~~
david-cako
Email “works” but it’s ass for consistently displaying anything more than
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.

~~~
shostack
As a marketer my fear is Google sees what FB is doing to monetize the feed
format and it is moving to turn email into the next algorithmically controlled
feed it can turn into a dynamic auction.

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.

~~~
wwweston
> algorithmically controlled feed it can turn into a dynamic auction.

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.

~~~
shostack
It has started with the tabs, you are right.

I don't think introducing ads into the feed is as ludicrous as you say from a
business standpoint. If done properly, I could see Google avoiding a mass
exodus while simultaneously opening up more inventory for them. In some ways,
I see Inbox as a test towards this vision.

My broader concern is a fundamental shift in the ownership of a customer/user
relationship and the cost of reaching them. In today's world, you pay a fixed
price for your ESP, and then some CPM rate for volume typically. Your costs
are known, often negligible, and entirely under your control. Likewise, as
long as you follow best email practices and nurture healthy relationships with
those on your email lists, you have an expectation that your email will land
in their inbox if they want to receive it.

That is similar to what FB had back in the day when someone Liked your brand
page. If you posted, they would see it assuming they scrolled through their
feed enough.

My fear is that Google will change that dynamic such that you cannot be
guarantee to reach your audience (even if you have great deliverability)
without entering into an auction and paying a constantly changing price that
presumably will always increase as they maintain control as the new gatekeeper
of that customer communication.

------
amthewiz
Seems over-engineered. Why not the following simple setup -

\- 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

~~~
ocdtrekkie
Indeed. I can definitely see a reason one might want a dynamic experience in
an email. I'd love to interact with some notifications without leaving my
inbox. But that'd be select apps I want to work with, not something my email
client should assume I want. Every marketing email I get shouldn't be an
interactive page by any means.

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."

------
marcell
Good luck! I had the "pleasure" of working on HTML emails a few months back.
It was unbelievably painful. Getting even a simple email to display
consistently across a dozen different mail clients is a huge pain. This is why
so many marketing emails use giant images for everything--it's the simples way
to get consistent rendering.

I predict whatever Google launches will work in GMail, and GMail only.

~~~
jrobn
Sometimes I think e-mail should have just stayed plain text. No HTML renderers
or other fancy stuff. Just type what you want to say and to whom and send. You
know what does fancy marketing "e-mails" really well without all the horrid
HTML hackery? It is RSS (or Atom).

~~~
dingaling
If HTML e-mail hadn't been invented then the need would have been fulfilled by
something else, particularly for corporate environments where formatting and
marking-up e-mails is essential to communication.

For a while in the late 90s / early 2000s we had RTF e-mail.

~~~
berbec
attachment: winmail.dat

------
jbg_
There's a recurring theme in the discussion of this (and actually any time
there is a discussion about email), that self-hosting email is really hard.
That hasn't been my experience. I've been self-hosting four mail accounts
(with moderate to high usage) on one server since about 2007. I briefly tried
gmail when it came out but never switched to it.

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.

~~~
Tepix
Yep. When you setup your server with a project such as sovereign you get
great, secure defaults and day-to-day maintenance is minimal. Mostly keeping
debian packages updated and upgrading the distribution every couple of years.

~~~
nvarsj
Until gmail/outlook/yahoo start silently blocking a percentage of your emails
for some obscure reason. It’s really hard to get self hosted email right - it
is very user hostile.

------
sharmi
For everyone who feels AMP makes the web usable: A few points for thought.

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?

~~~
tripzilch
Oh wow, I've been using Firefox Android (with uBlock) since ages. I never
considered that. But yeah whenever some app renders a page in some embedded
widget (probably Chrome) it's just .. .blegh.

So _that_ is what AMP is for? No wonder I've never seen the use.

------
bootlooped
Honestly can't think of a time I wished one of my emails had more
interactivity.

~~~
krylon
What exactly would "more interactivity" even mean in this context? Running
Javascript inside an eMail? What could possibly go wrong with that?

------
erikb
The author has really limited understanding of the enterprise world I believe.

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.

------
opensports
With the expansion of AMP, it's crazy to think of Google more likely to
undermine the health of the internet than the ISPs in a post net neutrality
world.

------
mulmen
As a user AMP has never once improved my experience. This topic comes up on HN
from time to time but I still don’t see any value in the AMP model as a user.
If it went away my experience would improve. Adding this misguided direction
to gmail will only reduce utility from a user perspective.

------
bastawhiz
I don't know the technical details of what Google is planning, but if they
build something that eases the pain of building cross platform HTML emails,
that's a welcome innovation in my opinion. Building emails that "work" even
just okay is a ridiculously hard task. Every company I've been at has made
some attempt with mediocre results at best (oh, you're using _Outlook_?).

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.

~~~
gerdesj
"but if they build something that eases the pain of building cross platform
HTML emails"

On the other hand, if HTML is excluded then the message gets through without
scope for mischief.

~~~
bastawhiz
HTML emails are here to stay, and the billions of dollars that companies pour
into designing, building, and sending them are proof of that. Given the
constraint that we're stuck writing and consuming them, I'd rather have a
technology that does a good job than a technology that makes me want to boil
my laptop.

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.

------
dreamcompiler
How to get promoted at Google:

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.

------
tyingq
Ugh. Hopefully unlike the serp results, nobody feels like they have to cave in
here due to the carrot/stick Google wields in search.

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!"

------
randomerr
Didn't Outlook Express have this option about a decade ago? yeah it was with
ActiveX plug-ins and Flash. Microsoft removed it because it was giving
advertisers and the wrong kind of hackers tracking information and access to
user's machines. Those were nasty security bugs.

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.

------
bob_theslob646
>What Google wants to do is bridge that moat, essentially to allow
applications to run inside emails, limited ones to be sure, but by definition
the kind of thing that belongs on the other side of the moat.

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.

~~~
PeterisP
The problem is that in this scenario someone _else_ (i.e. the sender) is
choosing the product/application they want to run on my device in my app.
Unlike a web page, where I (hopefully) intend to use it and "pull" the app,
this is designing a system where arbitrary apps and interfaces can be pushed
to me by others, often not with my best interests in mind.

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.

------
feniv
Besides the ideological issues, is the HTML tag for AMP emails seriously going
to be <html 4email> (html _lightning-emoji_ 4email)?

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).

~~~
jpp123
it is a separate mime type

~~~
feniv
You're right - it looks like it's available as the _text-x-amphtml_ MIME part.
I missed that on the initial read-through.

------
ajmurmann
A few months ago I set out to move to fastmail and then got lazy and didn't
follow through. This is the kick in the butt I needed.

------
JoshMnem
AMP is terrible for the Web too.

------
nicklaf
There are a number of threads here which seem to have been downvoted because
of the perceived quality of the ideas they contain. However, I always thought
that downvoting was meant to be reserved for low quality discussion, rather
than disagreement. Has this changed, or was I always wrong?

~~~
exolymph
People always have and always will downvoted for disagreement, whether they're
supposed to or not.

------
tribune
Google is on a mission to own every corner of everything related to the
Internet. Email sucks, but I'll keep my boring old email in lieu of Google
shoving more targeted advertising in my face, thank you very much.

------
thrownaway954
While I don't like the idea of AMP cause, let's face it, it's change, it
really is the next step of evolution for email. Email stopped being this
sacred thing when you could create an HTML email.

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.

------
antaviana
Personal communications are gone from email. They now happen in Whatsapp.
Gradually some one-on-one business communications are also moving to Whatsapp.
If Whatsapp ever figures out business communications at large, email is
practically dead. Excluding viagra spam, this means that nearly 99% of legit
communications that are today received in personal email accounts are
automated emails (transactional or bulk email). No wonder why Google wants to
reinvent email into some kind of personal engaging spot before it completely
dies for personal use.

~~~
thomasruns
Living in the US I literally know 0 people who use or have ever used Whatsapp.
That's not a judgement on their app, just a reality that in this country it's
not something people use.

~~~
martinald
US is definitely the exception. I've visited South/Central America, Europe and
at home in the UK and WhatsApp penetration is extremely high.

------
mtgx
> 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

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).

------
OOPMan
And here I thought there was no way to make HTML email worse. Guess I was
wrong.

------
verifex
I can't believe I read through this article and most all of the comments here
with no mention of what the hell AMP actually is, so I did a bit of Googling
so that someone somewhere won't have to.

Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) (
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerated_Mobile_Pages](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.

~~~
jbg_
You left out the very important detail that practically speaking, your content
also needs to be hosted on Google's CDN if you want to get any of the benefits
that content creators are likely to care about (being boosted in SERPs).

~~~
verifex
I don't know how I missed that, I must have skimmed around that point, yes
that is very important. Looking through the wiki page I found it quite easily,
but it doesn't stick out as much on the ampproject official page.

------
RyanShook
This article just reminded me how much I miss Google Reader... still to this
day can’t figure out why they canned it.

------
ancarda
Can anyone explain what this would look like? Just an HTML email but with
parts of it hosted on AMP’s CDN? Or the whole email is hosted on AMP, and non-
AMP email clients just have a link (and cannot view their email without
clicking on a link, and leaking the fact they viewed the email?)

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.

~~~
brongondwana
Almost certainly possible to make a regex matching filter to discard or file
such emails into a folder :)

------
ImaCake
>See, email belongs to a special class. Nobody really likes it

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.

~~~
pedrogpimenta
Did you continue reading after that sentence?

I also like forks, but I'm usually not telling people how great forks are.
That's what the article says.

------
vinniejames
*AMP is a terrible idea

------
lakechfoma
"Were people complaining that clicking “yes” on an RSVP email took them to the
invitation site? Were they asking to have a video chat window open inside the
email with the link? No. No one cares."

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.

------
gadders
When I read a phrase like:

>> allowing “engaging, interactive, and actionable email experiences.”

I immediately think advertisements.

------
Jaruzel
The problem we have here, is that a VERY large percentage of 'normal' users,
use gmail. As such, whatever Google do to 'enhance' the gmail experience, then
the other email providers feel they have catch up by adding the same
functionality.

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.

~~~
sdoering
I am currently a big fan of Google Inbox. I am loosing my fandom spirit more
and more.

> 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."

------
Animats
Is this only for gmail customers, or is Google sticking AMP links in outgoing
emails?

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.

------
paulie_a
Amp is a terrible idea.

------
0x29A-
Is this truly as terrible as the comments section here is acting like it is?
More engaging email sounds somewhat interesting to me. Should it stay as stale
as it is now? Maybe a few improvements for email development. A few standards
here and there, maybe the ability to make use of css properly for once. I
wouldn't mind some better looking emails that didn't require a bunch of images
loading to be view-able or some improvements made to how emails are developed
for those that do. Not that AMP solves that, but I'm happy to see the
discussion on improving emails coming to light.

------
ksk
People who are unable to create a product and get someone to pay for it, take
an existing product, reduce its utility and charge for the rest. Its like the
airline baggage policy. This is stereotypical-MBA thinking.

------
gwbas1c
In my job, I get a lot of automated emails from Github, our bug tracking
system, our wiki system...

(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.

------
tomrod
I like AMP. Brave browser seems to block most of the ads by default, and I get
the speed benefits for free.

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.

------
zeveb
> 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.

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.

------
mezzode
I'm not actually against AMP being put in emails, but adding unnecessary
functionality to emails under the banner of "AMP for email" definitely seems
like a step too far.

------
shao87
I've left Gmail for Tutanota a long time ago. I prefer having a niche service
that focuses on privacy and is committed to open source. They'll even release
the app on F-Droid soon, couldn't be more psyched:
[https://tutanota.com/blog/posts/secure-mail-open-
source](https://tutanota.com/blog/posts/secure-mail-open-source)

~~~
pedrogpimenta
Why Tutanota? Which were the services you compared?

~~~
shao87
I didn't compare much, but to me Tutanota is exactly the opposite to Gmail and
that's what I love. It's ad-free, no tracking, no scanning of data. Once it
has the app on F-Droid it's the only email service (to my knowledge) that
enables you to use it without any attachment to Google.

~~~
pedrogpimenta
Hey man, email existed before google :) You can use whichever email service
you want that's not google and use an open source email client like K-9 Mail
or AOSP's Email client :)

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.

------
cwyers
> 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.

Except forks are fine and e-mails are a dumpster fire.

~~~
Qwertious
> 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.

------
y0ghur7_xxx
I don't think AMP for email will have success. It works only for users with
gmail, so all other email provider users are left out. Why should someone
write an AMP email if it does not work for any client? And if gmail users
don't like AMP mails they can just switch provider or trash them.

I don't see a problem here.

------
simon_k_
Couldn’t help but think of this story in the back of my head:
[https://staltz.com/the-web-began-dying-in-2014-heres-
how.htm...](https://staltz.com/the-web-began-dying-in-2014-heres-how.html)

------
peterwwillis
Well this just speed up the process of me getting the hell off of Google's
services.

------
dannyw
We should start a boycott campaign against AMP for email. You know those
browser banners for people who are using old versions of IE?

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.

------
tripzilch
Finally! It's about time somebody made email accessible to people with a very
slow connection ... /s

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.

------
quickben
Is this how they try to increase profits now?

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.

------
ibdf
I don't want a webpage in my e-mail. HTML e-mails are already abused so much,
with fake links, and terrible marketing. And it doesn't help to quit gmail, I
am sure this will spread like fire to all other clients.

------
diaz
Soooo, is it now that someone shall explain what exactly is this AMP thing in
a tldr? No really into searching for it. Where do people actually see or use
this tech? I don't think I ever used it.

------
nikkwong
So what's the fallback for non-amp clients that receive an amp email?

------
gukov
One thing I have a hard time understanding: Microsoft got in trouble for
including IE with Windows. Why is Google given a free pass to basically shape
internet however they like?

~~~
pjmlp
Because according to the law, Windows was a monopoly regarding desktop
operating systems, but Google services aren't.

------
mancerayder
I'm paying for Google Apps for Business / G Suite. Does that make me more
immune from these types of shenanigans?

Sincerely,

Someone who, when seeing something for free, reaches for his pistol.

------
taeric
I'm just now finding out that google is planning AMP for email. :(

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.

------
SubiculumCode
I will put it out here and now: Gmail and me are done if Google goes ahead
with the AMP-lification of email.

~~~
FridgeSeal
For sure, it'll finally provide me the impetus to move to a service like
Fastmail/ProtonMail/etc.

~~~
toomuchtodo
I would contribute to a campaign to help FastMail support multiple labels on
messages. It’s the only thing keeping me tied to Gmail.

~~~
ocdtrekkie
The challenge is those labels aren't standards-based. Gmail has all sorts of
weird issues when you interact with it over IMAP. Even Google's own Takeout
will end up making multiple copies of your messages, one per label, as it
converts to folders. For a while I still had Gmail but used platforms Google
didn't support with first-party apps, and I had a lot of pain points. (Gmail
also likes to "archive" items [or remove that particular label] that you tell
Gmail to "delete" via IMAP. It's annoying.)

FastMail does an excellent job hanging on real standards, and so supporting
these Gmail-specific features requires that the standards themselves, support
such things.

~~~
toomuchtodo
FastMail is pioneering IMAPs successor:

[http://jmap.io/](http://jmap.io/)

In the spec, they supercede IMAP folders with “keywords”, which are comparable
to labels in Gmail.

“Users may add arbitrary keywords to an email. For compatibility with IMAP, a
keyword is a (case-sensitive) string of 1–255 characters in the ASCII subset
%x21–%x7e (excludes control chars and space), and MUST NOT include any of
these characters: ( ) { ] % * " \”

~~~
ocdtrekkie
Indeed, and as the case is "The data model is backwards compatible with both
IMAP folders and gmail-style labels".

Even so, unless you have a wide multiplatform selection of JMAP-based apps
which work properly with labels, you are better off with folders.

EDIT/Am at rate limit: I survived migrating from labels back to folders, and
probably wouldn't start using multiple labels again, should they be available,
until a point where it's a very common, well-supported standard behavior. No
more proprietary nonsense for me.

~~~
toomuchtodo
I’m already married to the multi label format, so moving back to IMAP is a
deal breaker. Eyes forward, no going back.

EDIT: Understandable! Safe travels on the path to owning your data!

------
dandare
The English word "terrible" is a terrible word. Even worse than garden path
sentences.

------
sbisson
AKA; let's reinvent Lotus Notes. I thought the last Domino had already fallen.

------
b0rsuk
Pop-ups and autoplay videos inside your email. What could possibly go wrong ?

------
Crontab
We should have never allowed email to have more than plain text.

------
del_operator
In the words of the first UCLA email:

LO

~~~
lsh
and for a solid documentary:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lo_and_Behold,_Reveries_of_the...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lo_and_Behold,_Reveries_of_the_Connected_World)

------
chrisvalleybay
This bullshit better not come to enterprise customers.

------
rowyourboat
Okay, I'll jump. Any tips on a good mail/calendaring/contact solution that
isn't google, and works and syncs across browser and mobile devices?

~~~
pedrogpimenta
I'm in love with [https://mailbox.org](https://mailbox.org) since I moved with
them, almost a year ago. They support standards. It works on the browser, on
Apple Mail/Calendar/Contacts/Reminders and even on Android with open source
software (or others, of course).

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.

------
atmasphere
Click to read full article.

Oh look an AMP url ... Sigh.

------
known
"I suppose it is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat
everything as if it were a nail" \--Maslow

------
schneems
s/for email//

------
redleggedfrog
Wave 2.0?

~~~
domoritz
Wait, I think that would be exciting. AMP on the other hand...

------
dingo_bat
> AMP ~~for email~~ is a terrible idea

FTFY. I cannot wait for this cancer to die off. For now, I avoid anything by
Google as much I can.

------
mankash666
I'll get down voted for saying this, but the HN crowd's hypocrisy is baffling.

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

~~~
simias
I'm not sure I understand your point. You're projecting a lot, there's more to
the world of computers than Google and Apple.

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.

~~~
jkahrs595
> At any rate you choose to buy into Apple ecosystem.

Yes and if I don't, too bad. I just can't iMessage the rest of my family who
did.

~~~
rz2k
Yesterday the HN discussion was about the terrible state of messaging and the
roles many companies played in getting to where we are now.

Email works pretty well between multiple different providers or even your own
server. How do plans that will “accidentally” take email closer to the current
state of messaging help the internet work better?

------
beedogs
Silicon Valley has been out of ideas since the late 1990s. Look at Google
trying to "fix" email, a system that simply is not broken.

------
dba7dba
Stay out of my emails google.

------
awiesenhofer
Can't wait until they release AMP Reader /s

------
ebikelaw
It seems like HN has lost religion on open standards and freedom of user
agents. If my MUA (which happens to be Gmail) can receive, interpret, and
display a certain type of payload (which happens to be AMP), then good for me.
It is nobody else's business what my MUA does with my messages.

------
xivzgrev
I, for one, welcome our new AMP overlords.

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.

~~~
kuschku
Cool, and as a user, I want every marketeer to be hanged and quartered
</sarcasm> But really, marketing as a whole is broken.

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.

~~~
matz1
A marketer doesn't have to actually like advertising itself, its just a tools.

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.

~~~
kuschku
Why should I?

Everything exists solely to serve society.

Something that does not provide a benefit for the users, should not be
allowed. That simple.

------
celim307
As heresey as it might be to HN I can't wait until everyone in the world
onboards onto one unified communication platform. Once (and if) lte and
unlimited data becomes ubiquitous I look forward to be able to make phone
calls, email, messages, video messaging, blogging etc all from one username
and account. I want to hand someone my username and be done with it. Facebook
is trying, but it's execution leaves much to be desired

~~~
craftyguy
I don't think this will ever happen. There are just far too many people, with
far too many requirements.

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?

------
guessmyname
Devin Coldewey against a bunch of Google employees, who will win? _(sarcasm)_

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.

~~~
pwinnski
Please consider what you're suggesting. Do you mean to say that Google cannot
possibly do anything that isn't good? Really?

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.

~~~
guessmyname
> Do you mean to say that Google cannot possibly do anything that isn't good?
> Really?

No, that's not what I am saying, please don't put words in my mouth.

My comment is divided in three parts: 1) sarcasm 2) question and 3) counter
argument.

The sarcasm is already labelled.

The question is what you assumed was an affirmation.

The counter argument is, "AMP works for some people", you said "AMP for email
is good for Google alone" which proves that my counter argument is true. AMP,
bad or not, works for some people (in your comment, Google employees), which
is what I originally wrote in my parent comment. I don't see what do I need to
reconsider from this. There is also comments in this thread from people who
say they like AMP, probing my statement even more: "it works for some people".

~~~
pwinnski
> 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?

That formulation is disingenuous at _best_ , and your follow-up describing it
as a "question" is just as bad.

How is it that you think your comment was acceptable when so many people
disagree at a website that praises itself for having some of the smartest
commenters on the web?

I hope that helps demonstrate the dishonesty of a question of that format. No
need to answer.

