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AMP for email is bad

tutanota.com

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Re: AMP for email is bad

#151

Post by dngray »

cromwellian wrote: post #145
josteink wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But not HTML applications . JavaScript is banned. Dynamic content is banned. This is good. We should aim to keep it this way.

Actually, you're wrong. Zaplets made this work somehow, and were funded to the tune of $90+ million in VC money. Perhaps they just used an iframe or , but never the less, Zaplets offered interactive HTML forms inside of mail that worked in Outlook. ( https://www.forbes.com/forbes/2000/0612/6514218a.html#224241... ) AMP Email is largely following what the Outlook 97 client was capable of. There's no apriori reason why…

> But the idea that Email can't evolve and change and should stay exactly the way it was, pretty much assures its death in the dust bin of history, the same way we lost USENET, LISTSERV, or even XMPP. Old standards didn't evolve quickly, users wanted silly features while neckbeards said don't violate purity of my abstraction.

Also the things you've mentioned there are different things. XMPP was never as widespread as email and is not in any way related to the other two. I am hoping Matrix picks up here.

LISTSERV is simply mailing list software, these do exist today as they did and are used by many open source projects. The most popular one being https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Mailman

USENET, does still exist, particularly for binaries. It's decline was mostly because of the cost to run the services, spam and the fact that smaller web forums were an alternative.

> And today, Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, WeChat, iMessage, et al, are the predominant messaging platforms, and email is for spam, receipts, and grand parents.

Not in business it's not, particularly where both parties want to have a conversation and not let those platforms in on the conversation. That is the majority of business and government conversation.

Email is not going anywhere.

Re: AMP for email is bad

#152

Post by michaelmrose »

wffurr wrote: post #130
michaelmrose wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I could probably make more money robbing a bank today than going to work. Nobody needs to provide an alternative sustainable business model to fuel my desire for sports cars and travel I just need to live with what I can make from legitimate work. Most of the web is either, cheap to run, paid for by other commercial activity, or crap and if it went away tomorrow because people could not pay for it by shoving their cr…

That's one hell of a false analogy you've got there. Essentially the entire web is funded by advertising; you are way off the mark with your assertion.

By volume the web is mostly crap that wont be missed.

Re: AMP for email is bad

#153

Post by michaelmrose »

joshuamorton wrote: post #63
nullandvoid wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why does it make sense for Google to control this prefetch mechanism rather than just using a browser built in with prefetch type setup

In what way does google control this prefetch mechanism? If you mean why does the cache (of which there are 3: google, cloudflare, and Microsoft/Bing) get to control the preloading, the amp limited set of html can be safely cached in it's entirety. So when I visit a search engine and an amp page is preloaded, it doesn't communicate with that domain. This ensures that cross domain preloading is possible without leakin…

If all the information about us all ultimately percolates out into the environment and everyone who cares knows the size of your bowel movement this morning can we properly say we have improved privacy because they have 2 sources instead of 3 on your morning movement?

Re: AMP for email is bad

#154

Post by jvolkman »

landryraccoon wrote: post #148
jvolkman wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or, maybe Amazon will helpfully add an alert to your order receipt when the shipment is unexpectedly delayed? At any rate, the other MIME parts aren't gone. In gmail you can just click "show HTML message".

> At any rate, the other MIME parts aren't gone. In gmail you can just click "show HTML message" If dynamically loaded content becomes widely supported, why would that mime part continue to exist? The web already doesn’t work without javascript. Why wouldn’t email quickly follow suit as well?

MUAs have widely supported HTML emails for decades, and yet Amazon still includes a text/plain part with their order confirmation emails.

Re: AMP for email is bad

#155

Post by jvolkman »

gopkarthik wrote: post #146
jvolkman wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or, maybe Amazon will helpfully add an alert to your order receipt when the shipment is unexpectedly delayed? At any rate, the other MIME parts aren't gone. In gmail you can just click "show HTML message".

> maybe Amazon will helpfully add an alert to your order receipt when the shipment is unexpectedly delayed? Alternatively Amazon could send a followup email. This way the sequence of events is preserved and not dependent on the sender. I currently use email as a immutable list of events that have occurred in my life but with this I can no longer continue to do so.

So just use a client that doesn't support dynamic email, or disable the feature in clients that do.

Re: AMP for email is bad

#156

Post by cromwellian »

dngray wrote: post #151
cromwellian wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually, you're wrong. Zaplets made this work somehow, and were funded to the tune of $90+ million in VC money. Perhaps they just used an iframe or , but never the less, Zaplets offered interactive HTML forms inside of mail that worked in Outlook. ( https://www.forbes.com/forbes/2000/0612/6514218a.html#224241... ) AMP Email is largely following what the Outlook 97 client was capable of. There's no apriori reason why…

> But the idea that Email can't evolve and change and should stay exactly the way it was, pretty much assures its death in the dust bin of history, the same way we lost USENET, LISTSERV, or even XMPP. Old standards didn't evolve quickly, users wanted silly features while neckbeards said don't violate purity of my abstraction. Also the things you've mentioned there are different things. XMPP was never as widespread as…

You don't have to explain what those things are, I've been on the internet since the 80s, and my teen years were literally forged on those platforms. Yes, smaller web forums killed USENET, and the reason they did so is that it was far easier to evolve controls for spam, for toxic posters, for adding features like voting, inline images, inline markup, custom headers/landing/etc than it was on a federated system like USENET. When the Web arrived, user expectations in terms of the ease of use and richness of the interface changed, which is exactly what's happening with email.

If business really wanted end to end un-eaves-droppable confidentiality they would have mandated S/MIME years ago. The very nature of a store-and-forward protocol without end to end encryption pretty much guarantees you don't have confidentiality unless the entirely of your communication is within your organization, and even then, it's not really secure because most business organizations did not run internal encryption.

The number of firms outsourcing to cloud services continues to rise.

Yes, Email is not going to die for internal business communication, but it will transform, and interactivity and dynamism are inevitable. Lotus Notes is a great example of this. Email is often used for workflow, for updates of real time information, and spamming people with status messages that link to dashboards is a productivity hit and produces information overload.

Re: AMP for email is bad

#157

Post by craftyguy »

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #41
craftyguy wrote: post #20

Email providers that only allow access to your emails using their special clients (instead of, e.g. imap) are also bad for email.

I think theoretically you can use AMP email through an IMAP client, if that IMAP client supports AMP. But support for it is probably going to be pretty scarce, particularly in the open source world.

But you cannot use tutanota (the sponsor/creator of this article) with an IMAP client.

Re: AMP for email is bad

#158

Post by 3xblah »

Lendal wrote: post #134
3xblah wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"... I actually tend to use DuckDuckGo anyways." "... I don't even like AMP." Any idea how many Google employees use DuckDuckGo? Is it really common, e.g., maybe due to sheer size of the workforce, for Google staff to dislike what their employer is producing and releasing on the internet?

I work at Johnson & Johnson yet I never look for JNJ products at the grocery store, (nor at the company store next to the cafeteria.) Doesn't mean I don't like JNJ. They're fine. It just means I'm a normal person that chooses products I like. I think maybe it's that when you work at a huge massive company, you stop feeling like you have to "help the company" all the time. The company is big enough.

"... you stop feeling like you have to "help the company" all the time."

Yet the commenter was bothered by seeing others' opinions on AMP.

I understand your point. I agree. However, in terms of their "core business", "products", or the employees who research and develop them, I do not believe Google is comparable with a pharmaceutical company such as JNJ. I have worked in both industries.

Re: AMP for email is bad

#159

Post by dang »

x3haloed wrote: post #22

I can't belive the neckbeard level in here. "I do all my web browsing with curl and vim. Nobody needs AMP!" Listen -- AMP is merely a set of guidelines and a framework to help developers make media-rich web content load fast. You can obviously achieve the same results without AMP, just like you can write a SPA without a framework. Duh. AMP is not "bad" or "good". Get over yourselves and your moral peacocking and get…

Could you please not post in the flamewar style to HN? We're trying to avoid that here. I'm sure you can express your substantive points without that.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: AMP for email is bad

#160

Post by dngray »

cromwellian wrote: post #156
dngray wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But the idea that Email can't evolve and change and should stay exactly the way it was, pretty much assures its death in the dust bin of history, the same way we lost USENET, LISTSERV, or even XMPP. Old standards didn't evolve quickly, users wanted silly features while neckbeards said don't violate purity of my abstraction. Also the things you've mentioned there are different things. XMPP was never as widespread as…

You don't have to explain what those things are, I've been on the internet since the 80s, and my teen years were literally forged on those platforms. Yes, smaller web forums killed USENET, and the reason they did so is that it was far easier to evolve controls for spam, for toxic posters, for adding features like voting, inline images, inline markup, custom headers/landing/etc than it was on a federated system like U…

> If business really wanted end to end un-eaves-droppable confidentiality they would have mandated S/MIME years ago. The very nature of a store-and-forward protocol without end to end encryption pretty much guarantees you don't have confidentiality unless the entirely of your communication is within your organization, and even then, it's not really secure because most business organizations did not run internal encryption.

The problem with S/MIME is that it requires a CA to sign that certificate. There's actually very few S/MIME CAs out there. Part of the reason S/MIME was always preferred in a corporate setting (over PGP) was that it could be decrypted by gateway border systems, ie administrators. Office 365 also introduces Office Messsage Encryption (OME) which is basically a temporary mailbox on their server. (Like Tutanota, or OpenExchange mail Guard) for external communication.

Encryption is also not really needed when you're all emailing each other on the same company server, which is most often the case. Even when stuff is outsourced there's usually legal service level agreements to maintain basic confidentiality.

> Yes, Email is not going to die for internal business communication, but it will transform, and interactivity and dynamism are inevitable. Lotus Notes is a great example of this. Email is often used for workflow, for updates of real time information, and spamming people with status messages that link to dashboards is a productivity hit and produces information overload.

I don't think it will. Just because Google wants to do amp4email doesn't mean everyone else will. Email has been getting more secure with things like MTA-STS, but those have gone through the IETF. I don't think it will see any adoption outside of the Google ecosystem, particularly without a RFC.

Email is very much has a "you said this on this date", and it is as if someone sent you a letter in the postal mail. I don't see amp4email getting any use in the business world. I think it will mostly be for "promotional email" aka spam you've agreed to get from companies that you've done business with before and didn't uncheck that box that says "notify me of all your offers...".

Google also has a history of trying things out then canning them in the future. Anyone remember Google Wave? that was 'totally going to replace email as we know it'.

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