Open Graph for Email

http://www.birdseyemail.com/developers

by esgie • 13 years ago

9 5 13 years ago

First time Open Graph has been used for email I think.

Maybe I'm missing something but don't most email clients ignore/delete Javascript in email messages[1]? If so, how does this technique work?

[1] For instance, http://superuser.com/questions/430562/does-gmail-or-any-othe...

robspychala• 13 years ago

That's true. All clients as far as I know strip out javascript for security.

What we do is actually inject scripts into emails to parse information in them.

We've built a bunch or scripts for social networks and retailers like ebay and amazon, but that doesn't really scale. Writing these custom script is time consuming.

So we thought, hey wouldn't it be great if the publishers of the emails annotated their messages with open graph tags (just as they already do with their websites) and that's how the idea. And we just parse those our using some simple javascript (https://github.com/birdseyemail/open-graph-protocol)

It's a bit of a chicken vs. the egg problem. We're hoping other email providers will adopt Open Graph in email so that publishers will have a reason to annotate their content.

And in the end the main motivation is that it's a great thing for consumers to have actions associated with emails. Imagine how much time you would save if you could "add to wishlist" your Groupon email just as easy as archiving it.

BillSaysThis2• 13 years ago

I think your goal is a good one. Can you clarify what you mean by inject scripts and how that isn't going to run into the stripping problem?

mike-cardwell• 13 years ago

Email providers will adopt this when lots of email and webmail clients support it. If I were you, I'd be generating a list of popular email and webmail clients and contacting the authors of all of them to try and convince them to implement the idea. I'd also be trying to write patches for all of the open source ones I can find, and plugins for those which aren't open source.

Open Graph for Email

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