The discussion is about integrating ViewActions/One-Click Actions schemas into Discourse emails, allowing users to click a button to view a topic directly from their email inbox. Moter8 initiated the discussion, referencing a similar feature on GitHub emails. Mooash provided an example of metadata that could be used to implement this feature.
Mooash worked on adding the functionality and submitted a commit. However, Moter8 discovered that the button doesn’t appear in Gmail due to the need for registration with Google.
The registration process has strict requirements, including a consistent history of sending a high volume of mail and approval from Google for specific high-value use cases. codinghorror and eviltrout agree that this feature is useless if every Discourse instance needs to register for it to work.
Moter8 argues that including the schemas could still be beneficial, as it could encourage more mail clients to support them. However, the consensus seems to be that the feature is not worth implementing due to the registration requirements.
So anyway, Github emails come with some extra html that makes action buttons appear on GMail and in Inbox, possibly even elsewhere but I’m not aware of any. They look like this:
So in what I could figure out, the itemprop name and the description are not visible at all on GMail but the corresponding string do appear if you Ctrl+F for them on the page source.
Inbox is even weirder as the itemprop="description" string is visible on the Issue email but not on the Pull Request one. Possibly caused by the mention.
Would be pretty if Discourse would use this schema/code/whatever too!
By the way, I noticed Gmail enables this sort of button for Amazon purchase emails too – But Amazon’s emails don’t even contain this schema. It is also localized depending on your Google Account’s language.
Mailchimp-sent double-in confirmations always send with them some metadata.
GMail uses this metadata to display a button (just like you can see on the screenshot) that users can click to automatically activate the subscription/account without even opening the email.
See the the bottom of the email’s source to see the used schemes/metadata.
I’ve made some modifications to the app/views/email/notification.html.erb which adds the basic functionality that this request is after.
My only issue is that it uses the translation for read_full_topic which probably isn’t ideal in this situation. It should probably read View Topic or something along those lines but I’m having issues adding another translation line.
Oh god, I should have read the documentation more. You have to register with google so the button shows up at all.
Some points come up which seem really bad to me:
Consistent history of sending a high volume of mail from your domain (order of hundred emails a day minimum to Gmail) for a few weeks at least.
We are currently only approving Go-To actions for very specific high-value usecase with high interaction rate (e.g. Flight Check-in, Shipment tracking links).
Maybe “Read full topic” is too unprecise for this recquirement:
Label of button needs to reflect clear action to be taken and must be true to page the user is going to
Shit. I didn’t realise you had to register to use this schema. Thats bogus.
@eviltrout should this turn into a toggle-able option? Having the schema at the bottom of the email doesn’t really change anything since it doesn’t add a large amount to the email (plus its hidden from the clients view)
that they do this.
there isn’t any point putting in a pull request that only displays the English language. 
