Gmail’s new ‘AMP for Email’ will make messages more interactive

Image: NurPhoto via Getty Images

Searching the web and responding to emails can quickly turn into a mess, especially if you’re the type of person who launches a new browser tab with each new task. Lucky for you, Google is here to clean up some of the clutter.

On Tuesday, Google announced “AMP for Email,” a new way for developers to make emails more interactive and help their recipients complete tasks more quickly directly from their inboxes. 

AMP, or Accelerated Mobile Pages, is something that has existed on Google for a while. For instance, opening a news story directly from a Google search page might bring you to an AMP version of that story that loads directly in the same tab instead of opening a new one. You can read the story and close out of the AMP page to go right back to where you were before.

AMP for Email will let senders put interactive and hopefully useful content within the messages instead of requiring users to go to another webpage. Some of the examples Google used included Pinterest emails allowing users to save items from directly within an email. You could also browse hotel rooms from inside an email or keep tabs on a comment thread that stays up-to-date right in your inbox.

AMP emails will apparently be supported not only by Gmail, but by Outlook, Yahoo! and Mail.Ru, as well. Aside from Pinterest, Google also listed Booking.com, Nexxt and redBus as some of the other services already making use of the new AMP features in a post on its G Suite blog. 

The initial rollout will only cover emails viewed in a web browser, with support for mobile Gmail coming soon. 

While AMP is a nice addition to Gmail, it comes at a time when the service is becoming decidedly less accommodating to some users. Users who prefer the Inbox by Gmail app, which has extra organizational features not available in regular Gmail, only have a handful of days left before Google shuts it down for good. 

In addition to that, internal API changes will kill off most Gmail support for the productivity service IFTTT at the end of March