

Open Graph for Email - esgie
http://www.birdseyemail.com/developers

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BillSaysThis
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...](http://superuser.com/questions/430562/does-gmail-or-any-other-
popular-webmail-service-scrub-javascript-from-html-email)

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robspychala
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.

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mike-cardwell
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.

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

