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Dynamic Emails in Gmail

A few days ago, Google announced making emails more useful and interactive in Gmail by making the emails stay up-to-date so you always see the freshest information, like the latest comment threads and recommended jobs.

The secret behind this is AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages), an open source framework developed by Google in collaboration with Twitter, through which your email messages can fetch up-to-date content when the user opens a message. In short, Dynamic email allows you to do things which would otherwise have needed you to follow a link to a web page. You can use Dynamic email to:
  • RSVP to events
  • Fill out questionnaires
  • Browse catalogs
  • Respond to comments
  • Update emails to display the latest content
The initial announcement by Google was made a little over a year ago, via this blog post, https://www.blog.google/products/g-suite/bringing-power-amp-gmail/, that discussed bringing the power of AMP to email through the Gmail Developer Preview of "AMP for Email." Now, following the recent announcement, Dynamic emails have already rolled out to Gmail users on the web UI with mobile support (as reported by Google in the same blog) to follow suit.

So how to enable it and join in the fun?

If you are a free, consumer Gmail user, it should be enabled by default. You may confirm this by visiting the General tab under Gmail settings - https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/?pli=1#settings/general and scrolling down to the section labeled - Dynamic email. 


The Learn more link takes you to the Complete tasks without leaving a message help article. A click on the Developer settings link opens up the following pop-up.


You would also want to confirm that the Always display external images option for Images in the General tab under Gmail Settings is selected; as the other option, Ask before displaying external images also disables Dynamic email.

You can identify a dynamic email when you see a lightning bolt icon left of the Date/Time when you open the message.


Note: The lightning bolt icon is not displayed next to the message(s) in the inbox message list.


 If you’re a G Suite customer, you will be able to enable dynamic email for your organization in the Admin console. If you’re using another mail app with Gmail, you’ll simply see the static version, and you can always revert back to it in Gmail if you prefer.

If you are a sender, you can visit the following resources for details on how to display Dynamic emails to Gmail recipients:
Update on November 22, 2019: Google has announced that this functionality is now rolling out to Gmail on Android and iOS.

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