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AMP for email is a terrible idea

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Re: AMP for email is a terrible idea

#381

Post by zerocrates »

josteink wrote: post #367
justaguyhere wrote: post #328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"you're allergic to Google offering free services that use your data for advertising, go pay for email" Yes, email is such an important tool that it would make sense for all of us to pay for it. That said, the big internet companies trained millions of users to expect everything for free on the internet (intentionally or not). Many people seriously think "if it is on the internet, it should be free - I am paying for…

Indeed. If I try to offer non-gmail email options to people, even here on HN, people will go “Oh. But they cost money”, as if that’s something deeply unnatural. Me, I’m happy to pay, because it means that I know I’m a customer, not a product.

This probably isn't so true for the pay email services, but I just wanted to note that these two things are by no means mutually exclusive. Plenty of services are more than happy to take your money and "make you the product." It's so easy to do on the web, few can resist.

Re: AMP for email is a terrible idea

#382

Post by wickawic »

colordrops wrote: post #36
FridgeSeal wrote: post #13

" “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…

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

For totally unrelated tinfoil-hat reasons I started using fastmail yesterday. Now I feel very vindicated in my choice, but it makes me wonder; since Gmail is so pervasive, will this action by them end up f-ing up email for everyone, the same way that many sites claim to only work on Chrome?

Re: AMP for email is a terrible idea

#383

Post by rch »

beagle3 wrote: post #315
RobertRoberts wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Their search products are a monopoly, their email is not. I provide paid email services for my clients, they can use Gmail if they want, or not. But for SEO, it's Google all the way down...

I’m not sure gmail meets the legal definition of a monopoly, but 3 months ago, gmail started to randomly mark some of my emails “spam”, and it has caused me non trivial financial damage, as it turns out about 90% of the people I correspond with are using google’s mail servers, whether @gmail.com or through g-suite. Feels as monopolish as any other monopoly i’ve seen in technology.

I use Gmail at home but my job requires me to use Office 365. A non-trivial percentage of people I regularly correspond with are using whatever their ISP provided when they signed up.

I've been in your position so I understand your frustration, but what you're describing is not evidence of a monopoly.

Re: AMP for email is a terrible idea

#384

Post by Jhsto »

daveFNbuck wrote: post #377
Spooky23 wrote: post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree. It was probably the single best social thing I’ve ever used. It was unique as it was actually social. Both my teams at work and family/friends used it as a way to comment on news and share stuff of interest. It was also a product of an earlier era where there was excitement over anything Google released. Google+ tried to capture many of the good parts of reader... but it was too forced.

The social aspect was the one part of Reader I never got. I don't think anyone I know uses RSS feeds outside of podcast subscriptions. I just liked that it was the only RSS reader I had ever found that just worked, and it synced my state as a bonus.

AFAIK, Google Now, which is well baked into Android uses RSS feeds. It might not be that people subscribe to them manually, but I'm sure there are plenty of people who do consume content from RSS feeds through things like Google Now. I personally find it nifty to receive updates on blogs according to my search history.

Re: AMP for email is a terrible idea

#385

Post by simias »

nebulous1 wrote: post #357
simias wrote: post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 e…

I'm not seeing where you're demonstrating that Apple only affects people who "choose to buy into the Apple ecosystem" but gmail affects everybody. I mean, there's truth to the idea that Google have more sway when it comes to trends on the internet, but when you say that a "a big email provider changing how email works", Apple could easily be the big email provider in that sentence

Because Apple owns its ecosystem. It owns iOS and the API apps use. It owns the app store.

Google doesn't own the email ecosystem. It's a decentralized system where thousands of actors exchange messages using standardized protocols. The last people who did what Google is doing were Microsoft. Remember winmail.dat? Remember the various hacks and options that litter open source mail clients and POP/IMAP servers to work around quirks and bugs in Outlook?

Just looking at my muttrc I find:

    # MS Outlook seems to like sending emails using cp1252 but setting the
    # charset to iso-8859-1
    charset-hook ^iso-8859-1$ cp1252
And that's just the tip of the iceberg. Dovecot has a bunch of custom options as well. That's what happens when a major actor starts disrespecting the standards, out of ignorance, out of hubris or out of spite.

Between that and how Google seems to want to force Chrome down everybody's throat at all costs it really seems that somebody at Alphabet found an old Microsoft "howto" from the late 90's and decided that was a good plan.

>Apple could easily be the big email provider in that sentence

I don't understand, are you saying I shouldn't criticize Google for doing something because I don't criticize Apple for not doing it? Trust me if Apple ever pushes some custom "iMail" format I'll say the same thing.

Re: AMP for email is a terrible idea

#386

Post by daveFNbuck »

Jhsto wrote: post #384
daveFNbuck wrote: post #377

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The social aspect was the one part of Reader I never got. I don't think anyone I know uses RSS feeds outside of podcast subscriptions. I just liked that it was the only RSS reader I had ever found that just worked, and it synced my state as a bonus.

AFAIK, Google Now, which is well baked into Android uses RSS feeds. It might not be that people subscribe to them manually, but I'm sure there are plenty of people who do consume content from RSS feeds through things like Google Now. I personally find it nifty to receive updates on blogs according to my search history.

Those people aren't using RSS feeds in a way that would make something like Google Reader social for me.

Re: AMP for email is a terrible idea

#387

Post by ocdtrekkie »

mrtksn wrote: post #266
scrollaway wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Is there a way to keep my.name@gmail.com but moving to another provider? Yes and no. GMail does support IMAP access (Go here to enable it: https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/#settings/fwdandpop ). IMAP is a standard that allows you to access an inbox remotely. OTOH, as long as you are using @gmail.com in your address, you are at their mercy. Go to https://www.gandi.net and purchase a domain name, it'll cost you FastM…

I like Gmail a lot, my problem is with the lock-in due to the domain. I don't really want to move to some other service - what I want is the assurance that Google is not going to do something funny with my account or service and unfortunately if they do I will have no recourse. When I got my Gmail account in 2004 Google was this amazing website that will give away free services and their motto was "Don't Be Evil", at…

It takes time to solve the lock-in, but it's worth it. I started switching to my own domain 18 months before I jumped to FastMail. First my new email address forwarded to Gmail, and I just switched which email was on each account as I used it. When I switched to FastMail and repointed my email there, most new email came with it, and then I'd keep an eye on Gmail to see what still came there, so I knew what I needed to change.

I've been switched for over a year now, and I check Gmail once every couple weeks now, instead of daily, like I did when I first switched. (I also have a Gmail vacation responder set up to automatically email literally anyone who emails it to tell them I don't check it often and what my new address is.) Yes, I'll probably keep the address forever, but it certainly isn't used much anymore.

Ironically, I had issues with my Gmail address long before I wanted to change providers: My main Google account address has my old last name, and Google's archaic infrastructure[1] for identity provides no way to change it. I had a newer Gmail address forwarding mail to it, because I didn't have a way to move all of my purchases like Android apps and the like, over to my new address' account.

[1]Microsoft has no issue with your account having multiple Microsoft-owned and/or third party email addresses and letting you change the primary one. There's some wonkiness with different services not recognizing your primary email has changed, but largely speaking, this is manageable. I have the same Microsoft account as I had years ago, everything carried over, but now identified by my current email address.

Re: AMP for email is a terrible idea

#388

Post by lern_too_spel »

saurik wrote: post #290
dwaite wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 classifi…

Google should have just not used a scrolling iframe. MobileSafari has this beautiful quirk that iframes greater than 8 pixels tall automatically expand to the size of their content, solving all of the awkward coordination problems of sizing the iframe. It would have been just so damned simple for Google to fix this in MobileSafari :/.

The AMP viewer and the AMP cache page are served from different domains. Leaking the size of the cache page to the viewer page would be a security bug, which is worse than the scrolling bug that Apple actually had.

Re: AMP for email is a terrible idea

#389

Post by kuschku »

matz1 wrote: post #380
kuschku wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cool, and as a user, I want every marketeer to be hanged and quartered 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 p…

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.

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.

Re: AMP for email is a terrible idea

#390

Post by taeric »

SquareWheel wrote: post #358
wklauss wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'll get down voted for saying this No, you'll get down voted for the way you are saying it. There's a difference, and it's an important one. Cheers

I challenge you to make a positive comment towards AMP on Hacker News without getting downvoted. Sometimes it really is the content.

Oddly, I was seeing the opposite. General criticism seems to get downed quickly. Often with no dialogue.
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