HTML email reborn, as Google brings AMP to your inbox

Enlarge / Lightning bolts have currents from 5,000 up to perhaps as many as 200,000 amps. (credit: John Fowler / Flickr)

Google is bringing AMP, its cut-down version of HTML, to email. Starting today, Gmail on the Web will be able to support embedded AMP content, with support rolling out to mobile clients later. Gmail will also be joined by Outlook.com, Yahoo Mail, and Mail.Ru, with their respective developers promising to add support soon.

AMP for email isn't just a warmed-over version of email with HTML formatting. The embedded AMP content will be able to offer features such as interactivity without having to click away from your inbox. For example, an online store could send you an email about a product or promotion you're likely to be interested in, and the AMP embed could allow scrolling through pictures of the products and even initiate the purchasing process. Or Pinterest could email you a selection of the day's popular items and you could pin them directly from your inbox.

Accelerated Mobile Pages were introduced by Google in 2015 as a narrow set of HTML, JavaScript, and CSS capabilities that produced pages that are fast to download and render, could easily be packaged together, and were amenable to being embedded in, for example, Google search results pages. JavaScript features were limited to those offered by a Google-supplied library. This greatly curtails the range of things that pages can do in favor of being extremely cache-friendly and having consistently good performance.

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