Email Markup in Gmail

https://developers.google.com/gmail/markup/

by elwell • 10 years ago

419 108 10 years ago

developers.google.com

TimWolla3• 10 years ago

Note that this only is available to high volume senders (https://developers.google.com/gmail/markup/registering-with-...):

Consistent history of sending a high volume of mail from your domain (order of hundred emails a day minimum to Gmail) for a few weeks at least.

leesalminen3• 10 years ago

I'm disappointed this restriction is still in place (though I understand _why_).

My SaaS sends emails on behalf of our customers (using their From address). Individually they don't send 100 email per day to Gmail, but in aggregate our platform does.

brazzledazzle2• 10 years ago

How do you send it on their behalf, the on-behalf-of header or do you relay through their SMTP servers with their credentials?

tokenizerrr2• 10 years ago

Yes, it's really unfortunate. I tried using this for mail sent to myself before but it didn't work.

fredkelly• 10 years ago

you should be able to get it to work without approval sending to @X.com from @X.com iirc.

jusob2• 10 years ago

I have a very small SaaS and I was approved. I don't send hundred of e-mail to other e-mail addresses daily, but I do send a lot of e-mails to myself (server alerts and notifications). Approval process is very easy and takes 2 minutes, it is worth applying.

metafunctor2• 10 years ago

Can confirm. Sending a few hundred emails per day, got approved. Customers like it.

Also, this is an old thing already. I thought everyone had seen this in their gmail!

billrobertson42• 10 years ago

I have a similar situation.

Is there some sort of API to use for that? Or do you just use the normal means of sending email? If so, are there special terms that you have to agree to for this?

TimWolla3• 10 years ago

You said it “takes 2 minutes”: Is it 2 minutes to apply or 2 minutes to apply and get approved?

drewbie613• 10 years ago

You have to register imo mainly for security and to validate your intent with putting structured data in your emails. There are some awesome, but potentially harmful side effects if anyone was allowed to do this un-registered. For example, send out spam emails with event data that would flood people's Google Calendars with spam events.

bjt2n3904• 10 years ago

Mmmnnn. Not sure if want. My inbox is cluttered enough already.

Can see this getting abused by spammers and advertisers. I start getting "Pampered Chef invites" popping up all over my calendar.

burkaman• 10 years ago

You have to be an approved sender to use this. I think if enough people report your emails as spam you automatically lose access to these features.

math0ne• 10 years ago

ugh, leave email alone!

jimktrains22• 10 years ago

What's your specific complaint? This is about the markup in an html email, it actually has very little to do with "email" proper.

Moreover, other providers are free to support this markup as well.

Navarr• 10 years ago

There are a lot of complaints on this as if it's a new features.

This is quite an old feature - and one I love

arjie2• 10 years ago

I would love to be able to do this for internal email within a Google Apps for Work domain, etc.

anton_gogolev• 10 years ago

So this does not work with Gmail for Work/Business/G Suite/whatever-is-this-thing-called?

metafunctor2• 10 years ago

It works fine with "Google for Work" email.

xd19362• 10 years ago

Why can't you? I mean, their examples in the link even show how to implement this with a simple Google Apps Script project.

arjie2• 10 years ago

Huh, this has been available for a while so I actually didn't realize this was a new announcement. I was hoping the registration would be less strict if you're only sending within your own domain, but this is good enough really.

nilved• 10 years ago

This is a bad thing. Gmail needs to be e-mail and nothing more or this is EEE.

matt40777• 10 years ago

Why can email not evolve? Structured data in markup works well on the web. It's open and could be implemented by any client.

zlynx• 10 years ago

It's only ever going to work for gmail users. For people who read their email in text-only clients this will never do anything.

You know, people who use serious email, not to send pictures of balloons and 96-pt Happy Birthday in pink on purple text.

beefsack• 10 years ago

It's only "open" in that they detail the spec they've come up with. Email has been so useful and resilient only because it's an open standard which is broadly agreed on and adopted.

Once the big players start adding custom features on top of existing protocols we start seeing fragmentation and parts of the market being cornered off. Once people start depending on this custom functionality, the vendor usually starts raising the walls to lock people in (see GTalk -> Hangouts.)

jnpatel• 10 years ago

Sorry, what's EEE?

ChrisClark• 10 years ago

I think he means Embrace, Extend, Extinguish.

amelius• 10 years ago

I totally agree.

Besides, what is wrong with HTML? And why doesn't it render properly in the gmail client?

icebraining5• 10 years ago

HTML is semantically poor, so if they implemented this features in it, they'd have to use stuff like Google-specific links for the actions.

This way they can use a more data-friendly format created and supported by multiple organizations (Schema.org), which any client can use freely.

As a non-Gmail user myself, I'm quite happy with their choice, since it means I can make it work with my client and my calendaring software.

andrewguenther3• 10 years ago

Ironically, they did it to make it easier for other vendors to support. (Some) HTML renders just fine in Gmail, but not other clients.

agumonkey3• 10 years ago

Took a peak, saw <script> tag, left.

hota_mazi• 10 years ago

Please don't steal mountains.

sjwright• 10 years ago

It's just the tip.

agumonkey3• 10 years ago

Only twins sets.

xd19362• 10 years ago

The <script> tag only contains a JSON object. It's not a function that runs or something client-side.

quink• 10 years ago

Name another way of invisibly embedding a JSON object in HTML in every browser without requiring CSS.

jimktrains22• 10 years ago

It wouldn't be JSON, but semantic markup would be another option. (Not that I agree with the GP here, just saying.)

deno2• 10 years ago

Since you asked, one option would be to simply include it as an alternative part in the MIME message (which email is). In fact, I would argue, that’s the correct option.

arenaninja2• 10 years ago

Please no. I just started using ProtonMail and plan to lower my usage of gmail... I don't want other clients held to an arbitrary standard of email

matt40777• 10 years ago

ProtonMail may not be the best choice if you're a stickler for standards. Their service unapologetically works only within ProtonMail. Send an e-mail to someone with a different provider and they get a link to a https view of the email.

arenaninja2• 10 years ago

Thanks, though I set it up yesterday mostly for receiving, I don't plan to send anything from it

Is there another email provider that isn't hotmail, gmail or yahoo mail with good prospects at the moment?

cdubzzz• 10 years ago

For encrypted emails, yes. Not for regular emails.

They don't support PGP (Does Gmail?) at the moment, but are apparently working on it. What other approaches are there?

ChrisArchitect• 10 years ago

[2015]

cyberferret3• 10 years ago

FWIW, this has been around for a long while now. I like being able to do things like confirm a sign up to a service, close support tickets, get shipping ETAs etc. with just one click on the global Inbox view rather than having to open an email up.

Looking to incorporate these into our own SaaS apps too, as soon as I get some spare time. I think this is a step in the right direction to reduce Inbox fatigue. Here's hoping that Google will be vigilant enough to stop people abusing this service.

shimon• 10 years ago

That's why they have an approval process for these features. It would be really terrible if phishing attacks could exploit "track package" or "check-in for flight" buttons.

mderazon2• 10 years ago

I don't see how this can be abused really.

The most it can do is send a GET request to a remote server

kennydude• 10 years ago

I kinda like this. Some big players are adding these to emails, and you can easily add the parsing to a third-party client (Inbox, where this appears in, hurts my head so I refuse to use it)

mtgx• 10 years ago

Oh sure, this it can work on, but a proprietary/non-federated E2E encrypted mechanism for Gmail emails alone is out of the question.

joering2• 10 years ago

From their form: Is your email Promotional or has a Promotional Intent or is a Sollicitation?

I like how you can answer both "no" and "yes" so that they will manually review.

callmeed• 10 years ago

Feels like this will get (over|ab)used by the same people who have already done it with email newsletters and promotions.

I google search for "birthday gift for mom" and now some retailer who has already emailed me a similar promotion will get that in the top of my search results? Meh.

andrewguenther3• 10 years ago

That's absolutely not how this works. You can't just add a card to an arbitrary search term. There are only four such schemas supported (event, flight, hotel, and restaurant confirmations).

https://developers.google.com/schemas/search/answers

bradleybuda• 10 years ago

(self-link)

When this first launched, we found the technical docs for integrators to be a bit lacking, so wrote this up: http://blog.meldium.com/home/2014/5/19/setting-up-gmail-inbo...

It's Rails-centric, but will likely be helpful to integrators in other languages. Hope it's helpful!

cyberferret3• 10 years ago

Nice write up. Definitely helpful, and bookmarked for future reference.

nebulous1• 10 years ago

What the fuck is this page? Stop giving me an abstract and just tell me what's changed, if anything.

xfalcox• 10 years ago

I would love to have a standard way to get Glanceable Newsletters for the summary in the open source Discourse project.

jeena• 10 years ago

Answers in Search

It will be fun to see private emails poping up in the search when someone is sitting there with you while you do your search who should not have access to those emails.

mark_l_watson• 10 years ago

To bad it won't work for sending invites to friends for group hikes, with a map, etc.

That said, I tend to only use gmail for travel related email so reservations get into my calendar. For everything else I try to use my own domain on FastMail, or sometimes ProtonMail.

cyberferret3• 10 years ago

I think it is possible to achieve what you want (hiking invites). It may mean writing a small web service (AWS Lambda?) which can respond to the call to action in the script.

Not so practical for a one off event, but if you were doing this all the time, you could build a service that offered this sort of facility to the masses.

i336_2• 10 years ago

Oooooh, so that's how this[1] works! Wondered what sort of infrastructure was surrounding that, now I have a general idea.

Cool.

[1] http://i.imgur.com/NGqqwad.png

NB, I can't see anything that specifically provides exactly this type of button in the API, and arbitrary buttons are sadly unlikely to be made available. [EDIT: Actually you can - see comment]

(Did anyone notice imgur being unable to upload earlier? It was 503ing out a few hours ago when I first went to post this comment.)

lexicality• 10 years ago

https://developers.google.com/gmail/markup/reference/go-to-a...

i336_2• 10 years ago

Wooop, I totally missed that, thanks very much.

So now we know exactly how Monorail does it, that's really neat.

Email Markup in Gmail

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