They’re intended to work and look like your usual Discord or similar emoji reactions, as long as it’s between Gmail users:
To non-Gmail users, those reactions would appear as regular email replies with a big emoji:
I don’t know how to feel about it personally, it’s the kind of feature that seems completely detached from reality as that’s certainly not how most people use emails, and the only thing it will create is more email garbage filling up your inbox.
EDIT: The person who found about the feature first (assembledebug) also added how to enable it:
Ben forgot to mention how it can be enabled 🙂 ?
You need a rooted phone and need to flip a switch of a flag using GappsMod.
Unless it’s open source, they have no reason to. In fact given Google’s influence and size, whatever Google decides, will become standard.
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They are. It’s just a new email header. It’s defined in an experimental RFC:
https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc9078
And I can tell Google is not following this spec, because the content is more than just a single line of emoji character(s).
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Ah, ok. Maybe Google is following the spec then. We can hope.
I remember reading somewhere that Delta used this spec specifically, but I could be wrong.