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AMP for email is a terrible idea

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Re: AMP for email is a terrible idea

#451

Post by philipwhiuk »

tlrobinson wrote: post #279
ChuckMcM wrote: post #141

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…

I don't consider email to be "done". It's pretty much my least favorite tool. The underlying protocols (SMTP and IMAP) are decent, but the clients aren't. It still lacks usable end-to-end encryption found in many modern messaging protocols/apps. Outright spam is mostly solved, but marketing and other notification emails I accidentally or intentionally signed up for consume way too much mental bandwidth, even with sup…

IMAP without NOTIFY which no major provider implements is terrible.

Re: AMP for email is a terrible idea

#452

Post by joedevon »

daveFNbuck wrote: post #203
Spooky23 wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of my coworkers to this day was so upset by the Google Reader fiasco that he has not used any google service in any form since 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 alterna…

I was too. For personal use I eschew new products by Google. iPhone is starting to have big issues but I'll never go back to a Google phone, computer, tablet etc.

AMP has gotten me to finally switch to Duck Duck Go. Gmail is too difficult to leave, but AMP for gmail may finally get me over the edge.

Still wish there was an rss reader as good as G. Reader.

Re: AMP for email is a terrible idea

#453

Post by lern_too_spel »

shostack wrote: post #440
lern_too_spel wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What does AMP have to do with your fear?

I see AMP as a stepping stone towards building a walled garden for the web. There's a lot of benefits, but definitely a loss of control and leverage for marketers in some ways. My concern is that as Gmail diverges away from the rest of the email world, if a significant percentage of a business's users still use Gmail, they lose direct ownership of that relationship. The tabs were just the first step. I see AMP as pot…

> I see AMP as a stepping stone towards building a walled garden for the web.

In what way? AMP is merely a subset of HTML that any mail client can implement.

> definitely a loss of control and leverage for marketers in some ways.

You still have to explain yourself on this point. It adds one more option for marketers in addition to the MIME types already supported. How does this cause marketers to lose control?

Re: AMP for email is a terrible idea

#454

Post by erikb »

Alex3917 wrote: post #426
erikb wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please give some examples. This sounds horrible, but therefore also true.

At the Inbox Awesome conference this year there was a talk on this, not sure if it’s online.

And you couldn't have invested the time to write a second or third sentence summarizing it?

Re: AMP for email is a terrible idea

#455

Post by JdeBP »

bastawhiz wrote: post #127
zeroimpl wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seriously. Would be great if somebody could just declare a new mime-type such as "text/html5" that could be used to activate modern html rendering in email clients and would be shipped alongside the existing "text/html" and "text/plain" components. Eventually when enough email clients support this, we could stop generating the legacy html emails and only include text/html5 and text/plain mime types in emails.

Devil's advocate: there's more to keeping email safe than just not allowing JavaScript. Most browsers let you have up to 255 drop shadows on a single element, which can really heat up your laptop. CSS animations can also cause havoc. Imagine loading a GIF from a server that just streams frames forever. You also don't want to immediately load images (for privacy reasons), and you probably also want to ban audio and vi…

If one is reading mail, a good quality MUA will not be "loading a GIF from a server" in the first place. The content to show should be all right there in the message to start with, included using multipart/, or it does not get shown.

* http://jdebp.eu./Proposals/gnksoa-mua.html#NoAutoFetchExtern...

Re: AMP for email is a terrible idea

#456

Post by JdeBP »

Larrikin wrote: post #186
antaviana wrote: post #185

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).…

Whatsapp usage varies wildly depending on region. A fragmented walled garden ecosystem populated by other apps like Messenger, Line, Kakao Talk, WeChat, etc will not kill email.

"A fragmented walled garden ecosystem" has also been a fair description of Internet electronic mail for quite a while, however. It was Balkanized years ago.

Re: AMP for email is a terrible idea

#457

Post by pedrogpimenta »

shao87 wrote: post #307
pedrogpimenta wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why Tutanota? Which were the services you compared?

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.

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.

Re: AMP for email is a terrible idea

#458

Post by 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.

Re: AMP for email is a terrible idea

#459

Post by bballer »

berbec wrote: post #208
Someone wrote: post #40

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? I…

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.

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