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AMP for email is a terrible idea

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Re: AMP for email is a terrible idea

#211

Post by berbec »

dingaling wrote: post #195
jrobn wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

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.

attachment: winmail.dat

Re: AMP for email is a terrible idea

#212

Post by Qwertious »

jacquesm wrote: post #115
Qwertious wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Only on HN...

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

Re: AMP for email is a terrible idea

#213

Post by puszczyk »

mankash666 wrote: post #207

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…

First rule of comments on HN, you don’t talk about downvotes.

Re: AMP for email is a terrible idea

#214

Post by dwaite »

davepeck wrote: post #182
lern_too_spel wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You could turn that around and ask why Apple didn't bother to fix something that was causing pain for some of their users and continued not to fix it after it was causing pain for most of their users. Google made a bad engineering decision, but I would place most of the blame on Apple. It's the same for IE and web applications that didn't work in that browser. Luckily, people (for the most part) stopped using IE. We…

It doesn’t feel equivalent to me; I tend to think that there’s a meaningful distinction between a bug known before shipping and a bug discovered after. That said, it’s fair to ask why Apple hasn’t placed priority on the scrolling bug, post-AMP. What the real dynamics are I can only guess; I’d love to hear from lurking AMP or WebKit engineers.

The three main issues are that scrolling behavior was busted, clicking on the top bar doesn't scroll to the top like it does in all other scroll views in the system, and the URL bar doesn't show the 'real site' so links shared via the built-in mechanism are links to google, not to the actual site content.

All three of these are Google not taking into account mobile browser design. None of these can really be classified as issues in Safari, rather they are consequences of the Safari design and the design choices Google made.

The first two are due to the content being embedded within an iframe.

The scrolling issue was partly because Safari implemented custom scroll behavior (supposedly due to a Steve Jobs request) for its main web view, but scrollable iframes did not override the scrolling behavior. The fix here (I believe it was rolled out in iOS 11) was to change system-wide behavior for Safari to use the system default scrolling behavior, so that everything behaved the same.

The title bar issue is due to the content not being a scroll view, but a view the size of the screen containing one or more scroll views (the iframes). Which of these should be scrolled to the top on a tap? Changing this behavior could change it for deployed sites, so rolling out any sort of new heuristic requires testing and probably wouldn't be done outside a new major version (e.g. iOS 12).

The third issue is across all browsers - Google is the one serving the content, not the third party that wrote the content. Because of this, any attempt to change where the browser 'thinks' a page is being served to another domain runs afoul of pretty fundamental web security principles. You might be able to design some sort of call (similar to CORS) to ask if google is representing your content in order to get permission to forge the address, but that would be a new web standard that hasn't been written yet.

Re: AMP for email is a terrible idea

#215

Post by StavrosK »

mankash666 wrote: post #207

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…

I'd just like to point out here that Fastmail is a great alternative to Gmail, one I like much better and regret not switching to it sooner. If you have your own domain, migration is as easy as importing your email and changing a few MX records, and it costs $3/mo for the largish package if you prepay.

Re: AMP for email is a terrible idea

#216

Post by B-Con »

mankash666 wrote: post #207

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…

> 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.

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.

Re: AMP for email is a terrible idea

#217

Post by Vinnl »

mankash666 wrote: post #207

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…

You're making a lot of assumptions about your readers here, and you're doing so in a style that's not going to convince those for whom those assumptions hold...

Re: AMP for email is a terrible idea

#218

Post by 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.

Re: AMP for email is a terrible idea

#219

Post by mtgx »

krrrh wrote: post #200
jacquesm wrote: post #105

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://redmail.com/ https://protonmail.com/ https://www.fastmail.com/

I’m a fairly happy fastmail user, and have been intrigued by ProtonMail. Has anyone made a switch between them or run both for an extended period of time? 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…

ProtonMail is quite nice. Just try it out. I would suggest you always keep it open in a tab and save your password in a password manager, otherwise you may "forget" to log to that email and may not use it often. Also make sure you set-up getting your emails into ProtonMail from day one.

Re: AMP for email is a terrible idea

#220

Post by adamsvystun »

mankash666 wrote: post #207

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…

> 1. Gmail is a channel that Google has under monetized for a decade.

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.

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