Schema markup for one-click to confirm subscription?

ℹ️ Support
1

In some mail programs like Gmail, when receiving the initial opt-in “please confirm your email address” message, some e-mail services have the functionality of a one-click button to confirm that’s inline with the subject.

Here is a non-working example of the HTML used by MailChimp to achieve the front-end part of this functionality. I’ve modified the “itemprop=url” to get the point across for phpList brainstorming purposes:

<span itemscope itemtype=http://schema.org/EmailMessage">
    <span itemprop=description content="We need to confirm your email address."></span>
    <span itemprop=action itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/ConfirmAction">
        <meta itemprop=name content="Confirm Subscription">
        <span itemprop=handler itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/HttpActionHandler">
        <meta itemprop=url content=" [CONFIRMATIONURL plus variables for u, id, e, and inline=true]">
        <link itemprop=method href="http://schema.org/HttpRequestMethod/POST">
        </span>
    </span>
</span>

As a relatively new phpList user, how would one add this kind of HTML to the subscribe message? Right now, it looks like text only.

Also, would the [CONFIRMATIONURL] variable as-is work in this manner – via an action handler via some http://schema.org/EmailMessage microdata markup?

Thank you!

Aaron Proctor
FWD:labs

2

@duncanc, to clarify this idea, is there a way to hook into 1) writing HTML for the confirmation e-mail and 2) any native ways to use a POST request to confirm a user joining a list (or does the [CONFIRMATIONURL] require GET requests)?

3

@fwdlabs The confirmation email (and others I think) can be html. It is just that the default are plain text, probably carried forward from when they could only be plain text.

Regarding your idea of a button, I would be surprised if generally email clients render an html form that is within an email. You might be able to style the link so that it appears as a button, but again that might not be consistent across all clients.

4

@duncanc, how does one enable HTML in the confirmation e-mail? I’ve entered code via the back-end UI and also straight to the database key/value spot, but it looks like the HTML gets wiped out when the send actually goes out. My normal campaigns are HTML and work great, so it’s just the confirmation e-mail (or non-campaign transactional e-mails) that seem defaulted to text only.

As for the relatively new schema.org markup, it’s not a literal form in the e-mail. See https://developers.google.com/gmail/markup/reference/one-click-action for more about it and how it appears alongside a subject line.

5

You probably need to create a default system template on the Manage campaign templates page. Without that, the html in the message is ignored, which is possibly a bug.