Getting started

This page will focus on how you can already use structured email from a sender perspective to improve the experience of email reicipients.

Mark up your emails

The core idea of structured email is to allow tools on your behalf to better understand email content. Therefore, senders can add a machine-readable variant of the content to an email.

This can be done by adding structured data in the JSON-LD format into the HTML body part of your email.

Preparing JSON-LD

According to the content of your email, you need to provide appropriate structured data. For many common use cases, the Schema.org vocabulary provides blueprints for reuse.

JSON-LD example data

    {
      "@context": "https://schema.org",
      "@type": "FlightReservation",
      "reservationId": "RXJ34P",
      "reservationStatus": "https://schema.org/ReservationConfirmed",
      "passengerPriorityStatus": "Fast Track",
      "passengerSequenceNumber": "ABC123",
      "securityScreening": "TSA PreCheck",
      "underName": {
        "@type": "Person",
        "name": "Eva Green"
      },
      "reservationFor": {
        "@type": "Flight",
        "flightNumber": "UA110",
        "provider": {
          "@type": "Airline",
          "name": "Continental",
          "iataCode": "CO",
          "boardingPolicy": "https://schema.org/ZoneBoardingPolicy"
        },
        "seller": {
          "@type": "Airline",
          "name": "United",
          "iataCode": "UA"
        },
        "departureAirport": {
          "@type": "Airport",
          "name": "San Francisco Airport",
          "iataCode": "SFO"
        },
        "departureTime": "2017-03-04T20:15:00-08:00",
        "arrivalAirport": {
          "@type": "Airport",
          "name": "John F. Kennedy International Airport",
          "iataCode": "JFK"
        },
        "arrivalTime": "2017-03-05T06:30:00-05:00"
      }
    }

Source: https://schema.org/FlightReservation

In many cases, you will not want to manually generate your JSON-LD, but instead let it generate automatically with the help of tools.

Adding JSON-LD to your email

JSON-LD

HTML email body example

    <script type="application/ld+json">
        {
            "@context": "https://schema.org",
            "@type": "FlightReservation",
            "reservationId": "RXJ34P",
            ...
        }
    </script>

Existing vendors supporting Schema.org for Email do allow for other formats for structured data besides JSON-LD, namely Microdata and/or RDFa.

Prepare sending environment

Emails just sent like composed in the prior section will be processed by certain tools such as KMail underlying KDE Itinerary.

In case you want structured data to be visible for recipients using certain ISPs such as Gmail, Yahoo or Web.DE, certain additional preparations will be required as of today. See Schema.org for Email for additional information.