Gmail Actions - Schema.org

There is an interesting thing which I found today in one of my email in Gmail account which I thought of sharing.

Below you would see a mail from ‘Meru Cabs’  with subject as ‘Meru Booking Status: CONFIRMED’ & beside it there is a link which says ‘Modify reservation’ (indicating an external link)

(It might be that you already know,why & how it’s there but in case you don’t J)

The button is something which I found to be unusual as it does not appear in other mails but surely makes this mail to be different & ‘clickable’.

On clicking it I was redirected to Meru cabs site.

What made me curious was how to create such emails, so I googled it & landed on this developers page https://developers.google.com/gmail/markup/overview.

The answer to it is that Meru used Schema.org meta-data in their emails which are widely supported/rendered by Google/Yahoo/ in order to provide such actions.

On viewing the mail source code I found the script as:

<script type=3D"application/ld+json">
{
  "@context": "http://schema.org",
  "@type": "EventReservation",
  "reservationNumber": "33***2628",
  "reservationStatus": "http://schema.org/Confirmed",
  "underName": {
    "@type": "Person",
    "name": "Pankaj Khattar"
  },
  "reservationFor": {
    "@type": "Event",
    "name": "My Meru Cab Booking",
    "startDate": "2014-01-06T21:00:00+05:30",
    "location": { 
      "@type": "Place",
      "name": "NOIDA SECTOR",
      "address": {
        "@type": "PostalAddress",
        "streetAddress": "Sector, Noida, UP",
        "addressLocality": "Delhi",
        "addressRegion": "Delhi",
        "postalCode": "110001",
        "addressCountry": "India"
      }
    }
  },
  "modifiedTime": "2014-01-06T21:00:00+05:30",
  "modifyReservationUrl": "http://www.merucabs.com" 
}
</script>

The above script contains all the event information & hence informed Google about it, create that action button.

The developer page explains how to create such emails & add scripts in the mails.





Similar to above mail Gmail supports many other such actions like:

RSVP Action for events
Review Action for restaurants, movies, products and services
One-click Action for just about anything that can be performed with a single click
Go-to Action for more complex interactions
Flight interactive cards


Another important thing is that the event was also updated in the Google Calendar (there is another notification mail above that in the screenshot) & Google Now as well.


Hence the above actions actually helped in improving the user experience, and make it easy to take quick action.