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by landryraccoon 2546 days ago
Web pages don't have any expectation of durable persistence between views. If I go to Hackernews or Facebook or Google, I expect that the front page will not look the same as it did yesterday.

Email does have an expectation of durable persistence; in fact I would argue that that is a critical feature of email - If you send me an email I can always return to my email inbox and if I open the email I will always see the exact same message. I do not want that to change, in fact, as soon as I know that can change, it undermines the trust of the entire channel.

Will Amazon send me an order reciept, then subtly change the delivery date because it loads via Javascript? Wow, I could have sworn they promised it would arrive on Friday, now it's next week? What else could they change in my order as well? If I want an immutable copy do I now have to go back to paper printouts?

Even worse, what if I got an email using interactive features from a website that no longer supports those resources? Am I going to open my inbox and get a 404 because it's dynamically loading content that now isn't there? I have a reasonable expectation that when I open an email today, I can return to my inbox and see exactly the same content next week, next month and five years from now without having to question my own sanity. If I need to look at an order confirmation from a website that now doesn't exist because they didn't get their funding am I SOL because the CDN serving the dynamic email content is gone?

This is why I oppose AMP. This is a serious, legit criticism and I'd like Google to address it head on. User's don't want emails to become ephemeral, ever changing media because they want to feel their inbox belongs to them. As soon as it feels like they're visiting a site that belongs to someone else, it's not their inbox, instead it's just a bunch of bookmarks to changing, volatile resources that someone else has put into their face. It feels like an invasion, and it is.

2 comments

What I am curious to know is what stops someone using this to get around spam filtering.

Ie send something that gets through the spam filter then change it later.

Also on another note I'm pretty sure google marks your emails as spam if you say things like "getting off gmail" or "switching provider".

I have been sending emails to my mother for ages from my own domain (and email server), none of them have ever been marked as spam. One day I sent her an email about switching provider with a mention of some of the good ones on privacytools.io.

That email remarkably got marked as spam. It is a good thing she checks her spam box, but now I think I have all the evidence I need to get her to switch. Also, none of the subsequent emails I ever sent her got marked as spam.

That message going to spam is almost certainly an issue with the domain reputation of one or more of the URLs you included.

Easy to test, really. Send her a new message with the same text as before, but without any URLs.

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.
> 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.