I genuinely fear the future of email. Email is still the only piece of communication you can own, from top to bottom, from running the service to owning the domain[^1] it runs on. You were able to send anyone email, regardless of rank, location, social status.
Google (and recently, Outlook) is taking all of it away. It's putting mail from people not on your contact list in spam[^3]; it's by default blaclisting IPs within certain range[^2]; now it's bringing it's own format as well.
Is this embrace, extend, extinguish, Google style?
[^1]: let's not get into the problem of DNS never really being owned, only rented, for now
I run my own mail server and Google - for once - seems to play reasonably nice, it is Microsoft and Apple that are the harder cases, in part because they outsourced some of their vetting to third parties.
I've been mulling switching to Google or some other email provider for a long time and I still feel that this is the last bit of corporate independence that I'm willing to give up. Our mail is ours. I don't care of the counterparty is using gmail or whatever other flavor of cloud services they care for but running your own mail server should be a first test of whether or not you are an IT business or not.
It borders on the ridiculous to have to outsource something as essential and confidential to a commercial provider in another country who only entered the scene about a decade after us, especially because I see those commercial providers as the biggest part of the problem to begin with and this feels like rewarding them for their abusive behavior.
A snail mail analogy escapes me but it would involve sending your post all the way around the planet first before dropping it in the mailbox in the next town over, with some random elements for delivery or non-delivery thrown in for added amusement.
All this gives rise to some frustration on occasion, it is no fun to have your legitimate email classed as spam for reasons not under your control but so be it, I'll take that over giving up autonomy.
Google 'AMP' for email is yet another step in the wrong direction and I'm sure that it will get a lot worse before it will get better but at some point I'd hope that people will wake up to the fact that all this consolidation of power is a negative thing.
Google/Microsoft didn't kill email, spam did. Google/Microsoft then salvaged from the abyss something largely similar to email, but with some limbs all but severed.
Email is already fucked. In my experience Gmail often failed to receive emails from services like Yandex and Zoho. Plenty of people here that setup their own servers, and know what they are doing, getting randomly blacklisted.
Maybe it's fine if email is not central to your life or business but if there's even a, let's say, 10% chance of my emails not getting delivered to Mr Google I have no other option than to bend the knee.
The only reason they can do this is because of the abuse of email. Getting email from everyone means getting email from every spammer every day. Anyone could stand up their own email server, or grab a new address from their ISP or Yahoo or a zillion other free/cheap email hosts. But Google dominates because they reduce the amount of crap their users have to put up with. Blacklists are a feature that users seek out.
And yet I still use email because I am no longer inundated with spam thanks to the likes of Google and Microsoft. Without them I'd have given up on email altogether.
Google and Microsoft certainly did not help, but let's not forget that many of these features were made to combat spam which got more sophisticated over time. Having all mail delivered all the time, trusting everybody on the web and so on was fine when internet was for enthusiasts. In today's environment, however, plain old e-mail has insufficient protection and overly optimistic design.
I experienced [^3] as well, but every time I dug into it, it was due to misconfigured mail servers like missing SPF records.
Unless somebody has proof for it, I guess attributing it to a poorly explained AI black box instead of malicious intent is more sensible, similar to the "Facebook is listening to conversations and showing ads accordingly".
Why is it the only form? You can certainly run your own IRC or Jabber server or something. I don't understand why you think only email can be run top to bottom.
Unfortunately email became stupid a long time ago. Partly thanks to braindead clients like Outhouse and partly thanks to Gmail. Remember when Gmail came out and they advertised "threads" as a feature? Yeah... we had threads before Outhouse et al. proliferated enough to make them useless.
And don't forget the way those clients make you "quote" previous messages.
Free software mailing lists still make email nice to use. Simple, plain text and intelligent.
Can you just mine my data unobtrousively instead of screwing with every service I stupidly provide my lifes details? Already migrating, not because of the obvious privacy issues, but useability. How can a company that profits by knowing what people think and talk about, see so little of the house collapsing around them? Even free isn't cheap enough, it has to work.
I think I speak for a fair number of HN readers when I say, Literally everything google offered 10-15 years ago was better. Talk, gmail, voice, search (with booleans!). Its all a wasteland now, begotten and forgotten for sweet advertising and big data deals.
> I think I speak for a fair number of HN readers when I say, Literally everything google offered 10-15 years ago was better. Talk, gmail, voice, search (with booleans!). Its all a wasteland now, begotten and forgotten for sweet advertising and big data deals.
Eh... I think you should speak for yourself and convince with arguments instead.
How are these products worse? Search gives much more relevant users, pretty much killed SEO as a thing, now using page size and performance as metrics to push mobile-friendly websites higher when you're on your mobile.
Gmail is just significantly better in every way.. including privacy: They stopped using emails for ads. [0]
Of course, RIP Google Talk, but Voice is much better now, with a VoIP option coming soon.[1]
With AMP for Email, Google is keeping users within Gmail when when they’re interacting with your website or service.
The strategy of Google / AMP is clear: using its monopoly to convert the open web into properties of Google.
AMP is as “open” as Adobe Flash (Flex, etc) is open. Sure, it may he open source, but it is encumbered by license keys (see: AMP Cache), special privileges (again see: Google search cache), and development totally in control by Google.
I wonder what this will do to third party conversion tracking. Email is a primary marketing channel for many businesses with Gmail as a primary email client of their audiences.
For those who are frustrated by this, if you can, please show others that there are other options (just like you have done with DuckDuckGo) and switch to any of these (listing only those that are cheap enough to have multiple mailboxes without spending several hundred dollars a year):
1. Posteo.de
2. Mailbox.org
3. Tutanota.com
4. Protonmail.ch
I know some people can run their own setup. The above are for people who cannot or do not want to do it.
Why the negativity? If google doesn't innovate in open web technologies, then closed systems will win, in this case Slack. Sure, bummer that they used the much-maligned "AMP" name and double-bummer that they didn't build a coalition among email client-writers first, incl Outlook.
My assumption us that AMP4email will get replaced by a truly-open standard (aka multi-vendor support), following the same path as Google's early R&D efforts in browser local storage and improved networking.
Google: what I'd really like to see is a way to authenticate between email sender-receiver (perhaps a one-time, OAuth-like dance with a website?). In addition to nuking certain forms of phishing attacks, users could [reasonably safely] conduct e-commerce inside the email client (much faster, more consistent etc)... kinda like wechat, etc.
> If google doesn't innovate in open web technologies, then closed systems will win
Besides the question of relevance (why do we care about web technologies in email, when studies have shown that most people prefer plain text, anyway?), this sounds like a straight up Appeal to Consequences.
I read the post and I have still no idea what is this about.
They say that the spec is available. But where? They link to https://github.com/ampproject , which is just a list of projects, none of which seem relevant.
I noticed that AMP has recently started adding 'apps' to my launcher in Android. I visited Vimeo.com in mobile Chrome and then suddenly a Vimeo app icon with a little AMP symbol showed up in my launcher without any opt-in.
My guess is owning the user time, e.g if you read article via AMP you don't even visit the original website anymore. Same with providing answers directly in the search results.
The long term benefits are that they stem the bleeding of everything moving inside mobile apps. They need content on the web to remain useful and developers have shown they're unable to make good mobile experiences themselves.
I think this particular move is more tactical than strategic. I think it provides a better experience for users and keeps Pinterest, one of the main AMP users, happy with Google.
Get 'em hooked on something 'free', then monetize it. Rinse and repeat. Just like they are building a browser that only blocks the 'annoying ads', now they are designing their email to let advertising through. So much for 'don't be evil'.
It's amazing how the world's largest internet company cannot build a good blog. I don't know why Google is so insecure it thinks it needs to resort to the same tactics used by third-rate blogspam sites to keep users reading their blog posts.
This is what the site looks like with both sticky bars open on my 900px high screen. This is atrocious. https://i.imgur.com/o5hcENG.png
I use e-mail just as much today as I did 10-15 years ago. Some communication takes place in real-time messaging services, but e-mail is still useful for long-form communication, and less timely messages. IMing can't replace e-mail for me for all purposes.
The Google post mentions a report in which they claim that 270 billion emails are sent per day by 3.1B users, and usage is still increasing.
Slack, with 6M daily users, is not even close.
I'm not limited by characters. Sending an image doesn't cost a fortune. It's much easier to attach files like zips, and to extract them on the other end.
What's the advantage of SMS? It just seems like a poorly stripped down email service, with more control from carriers.
I am very down on AMP. I did indeed think they would try to embrace and extend the web to be inside their own walled garden. If I was a publisher who didn't control my content or even Pinterest I would be genuinely terrified.
[+] [-] pmlnr|8 years ago|reply
Google (and recently, Outlook) is taking all of it away. It's putting mail from people not on your contact list in spam[^3]; it's by default blaclisting IPs within certain range[^2]; now it's bringing it's own format as well.
Is this embrace, extend, extinguish, Google style?
[^1]: let's not get into the problem of DNS never really being owned, only rented, for now
[^2]: https://wiki.hetzner.de/index.php/Microsoft_Blacklist/en
[^3]: only experienced it, friends did as well, but I don't have proof.
[+] [-] jacquesm|8 years ago|reply
I've been mulling switching to Google or some other email provider for a long time and I still feel that this is the last bit of corporate independence that I'm willing to give up. Our mail is ours. I don't care of the counterparty is using gmail or whatever other flavor of cloud services they care for but running your own mail server should be a first test of whether or not you are an IT business or not.
It borders on the ridiculous to have to outsource something as essential and confidential to a commercial provider in another country who only entered the scene about a decade after us, especially because I see those commercial providers as the biggest part of the problem to begin with and this feels like rewarding them for their abusive behavior.
A snail mail analogy escapes me but it would involve sending your post all the way around the planet first before dropping it in the mailbox in the next town over, with some random elements for delivery or non-delivery thrown in for added amusement.
All this gives rise to some frustration on occasion, it is no fun to have your legitimate email classed as spam for reasons not under your control but so be it, I'll take that over giving up autonomy.
Google 'AMP' for email is yet another step in the wrong direction and I'm sure that it will get a lot worse before it will get better but at some point I'd hope that people will wake up to the fact that all this consolidation of power is a negative thing.
[+] [-] mseebach|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] randomString1|8 years ago|reply
Maybe it's fine if email is not central to your life or business but if there's even a, let's say, 10% chance of my emails not getting delivered to Mr Google I have no other option than to bend the knee.
[+] [-] dannyw|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sp332|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nkrisc|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yoz-y|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hobofan|8 years ago|reply
Unless somebody has proof for it, I guess attributing it to a poorly explained AI black box instead of malicious intent is more sensible, similar to the "Facebook is listening to conversations and showing ads accordingly".
[+] [-] unknown|8 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] cup-of-tea|8 years ago|reply
Unfortunately email became stupid a long time ago. Partly thanks to braindead clients like Outhouse and partly thanks to Gmail. Remember when Gmail came out and they advertised "threads" as a feature? Yeah... we had threads before Outhouse et al. proliferated enough to make them useless.
And don't forget the way those clients make you "quote" previous messages.
Free software mailing lists still make email nice to use. Simple, plain text and intelligent.
[+] [-] baby|8 years ago|reply
Email is already the worst form of communication. Spam has basically made it useless.
[+] [-] badwebsite|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ejcx|8 years ago|reply
You can own IRC as well. I feel like your 3 cons are my three pros.
[+] [-] nugi|8 years ago|reply
I think I speak for a fair number of HN readers when I say, Literally everything google offered 10-15 years ago was better. Talk, gmail, voice, search (with booleans!). Its all a wasteland now, begotten and forgotten for sweet advertising and big data deals.
[+] [-] halflings|8 years ago|reply
Eh... I think you should speak for yourself and convince with arguments instead.
How are these products worse? Search gives much more relevant users, pretty much killed SEO as a thing, now using page size and performance as metrics to push mobile-friendly websites higher when you're on your mobile.
Gmail is just significantly better in every way.. including privacy: They stopped using emails for ads. [0]
Of course, RIP Google Talk, but Voice is much better now, with a VoIP option coming soon.[1]
[0] https://www.bloomberg.com/.../google-will-stop-reading-your-... [1] https://9to5google.com/2017/01/26/google-voice-voip-integrat...
[+] [-] dannyw|8 years ago|reply
The strategy of Google / AMP is clear: using its monopoly to convert the open web into properties of Google.
AMP is as “open” as Adobe Flash (Flex, etc) is open. Sure, it may he open source, but it is encumbered by license keys (see: AMP Cache), special privileges (again see: Google search cache), and development totally in control by Google.
[+] [-] djsumdog|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] shostack|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rinze|8 years ago|reply
Thanks, mutt, for sparing me all this pain.
[+] [-] newscracker|8 years ago|reply
1. Posteo.de
2. Mailbox.org
3. Tutanota.com
4. Protonmail.ch
I know some people can run their own setup. The above are for people who cannot or do not want to do it.
[+] [-] avtar|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] robin_reala|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] asah|8 years ago|reply
My assumption us that AMP4email will get replaced by a truly-open standard (aka multi-vendor support), following the same path as Google's early R&D efforts in browser local storage and improved networking.
Google: what I'd really like to see is a way to authenticate between email sender-receiver (perhaps a one-time, OAuth-like dance with a website?). In addition to nuking certain forms of phishing attacks, users could [reasonably safely] conduct e-commerce inside the email client (much faster, more consistent etc)... kinda like wechat, etc.
[+] [-] ken|8 years ago|reply
Besides the question of relevance (why do we care about web technologies in email, when studies have shown that most people prefer plain text, anyway?), this sounds like a straight up Appeal to Consequences.
[+] [-] amiga-workbench|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jwilk|8 years ago|reply
They say that the spec is available. But where? They link to https://github.com/ampproject , which is just a list of projects, none of which seem relevant.
[+] [-] adewale|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] SippinLean|8 years ago|reply
It's a subset of existing AMP components.
[+] [-] Aaargh20318|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jonmarkgo|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jacquesm|8 years ago|reply
I don't want my emails to be 'engaging, interactive, and actionable', I just want them delivered with a minimum of fuss and preferably in plain text.
All this marketing bullshit is getting old.
[+] [-] oldpond|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bluedino|8 years ago|reply
Google is trying to turn Gmail into a platform.
[+] [-] siavash|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] petard|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Eridrus|8 years ago|reply
I think this particular move is more tactical than strategic. I think it provides a better experience for users and keeps Pinterest, one of the main AMP users, happy with Google.
[+] [-] oldpond|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] arkitaip|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tandav|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mediumdeviation|8 years ago|reply
This is what the site looks like with both sticky bars open on my 900px high screen. This is atrocious. https://i.imgur.com/o5hcENG.png
[+] [-] russell_h|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] odammit|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] odammit|8 years ago|reply
I am finding that I use it less and less each year. How much are you using it compared to previous years?
- My friend communication is done almost strictly through messaging services
- work communication is done through Slack and Jira (yuck)
I feel like email for me has become this awkward auth-proxy.
It’s how I magic link in, “confirm” who I am, reset my password, or get spammed by marketers.
[+] [-] OberstKrueger|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] l9k|8 years ago|reply
The Google post mentions a report in which they claim that 270 billion emails are sent per day by 3.1B users, and usage is still increasing. Slack, with 6M daily users, is not even close.
[+] [-] SquareWheel|8 years ago|reply
I'm not limited by characters. Sending an image doesn't cost a fortune. It's much easier to attach files like zips, and to extract them on the other end.
What's the advantage of SMS? It just seems like a poorly stripped down email service, with more control from carriers.
[+] [-] strict9|8 years ago|reply
A much larger than necessary header that bounces up and down as you scroll, with a insanely massive related articles sticky footer.
AMP is a scourge on the web and now they want to extend the plague to email? Please Google, just leave email alone.
[+] [-] 77pt77|8 years ago|reply
I feel very sorry for the state of email.
An interesting concept with very antiquated technology that is getting more and more centralized.
Having a personal/corporate server and interacting with the big boys (Google, Microsoft, even yahoo) is getting more and more difficult.
[+] [-] andy_ppp|8 years ago|reply