AMP for email is a terrible idea

I was curious what sort of lobotomy was employed:

> 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.

I was really upset by it too. I used to start my day with Google Reader the same way my dad used to start his day reading the newspaper. This was a crucial part of my morning ritual, and I trusted and relied on Google to maintain it for me. The sudden announcement that it would be taken away felt like a betrayal. It shattered my image of Google and made me completely rethink my dependence on them and seek out alternatives wherever I could.

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.

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

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