Email address validation with Actions in the Inbox and Mandrill

We launched Actions in the Inbox at Google I/O 2013 as a quick way for users to get things done directly from Gmail. Integrating with this technology only requires adding some markup to an email to define what the message is about and what actions the user can perform.

We support a variety of action types covering common scenarios such as adding a movie to a queue, product reviews, or other even pre-defined requests. Especially popular with senders is the One-Click Action to validate a user’s email address, as shown below:


If you are using Mandrill, the email infrastructure service from MailChimp, writing a Python app to send one of those emails, only takes a few lines of code! Take a look at this example:

import mandrill

# Replace with your own values
API_KEY = 'YOUR_API_KEY'
FROM_ADDRESS = 'YOUR_FROM_ADDRESS'
TO_ADDRESS = 'YOUR_TO_ADDRESS'
SUBJECT = 'Please validate your email address'

HTML_CONTENT = """
<html>
  <body>
    <script type='application/ld+json'>
    {
      "@context": "http://schema.org",
      "@type": "EmailMessage",
      "action": {
        "@type": "ConfirmAction",
        "name": "Confirm Registration",
        "handler": {
          "@type": "HttpActionHandler",
          "url": "https://mydomain.com/validate?id=abc123"
        }
      }
    }
    </script>
    <p>Please click on this link to validate your email address:</p>
    <p><a href="https://mydomain.com/validate?id=abc123">https://mydomain.com/validate?id=abc123</a></p>
  </body>
</html>
"""

# Instantiate the Mandrill client with your API Key
mandrill_client = mandrill.Mandrill(API_KEY)

message = {
 'html': HTML_CONTENT,
 'subject': SUBJECT,
 'from_email': FROM_ADDRESS,
 'to': [{'email': TO_ADDRESS}],
}

result = mandrill_client.messages.send(message=message)

To run this app, just replace the API key with the credentials from your Mandrill account and configure the sender and recipient addresses. You should also edit the HTML content to provide your action handler URL, and customize the messaging if you want.

You can use Actions in the Inbox to reduce the friction and increase the conversion rate. Please note that you are not limited to validating email addresses: you can also review products and services, reply to event invitations, and much more.

For more information, please visit our documentation at https://developers.google.com/gmail/actions. You can also ask questions on Stack Overflow, with the tag google-schemas.

Claudio Cherubino   profile | twitter | blog

Claudio is an engineer in the Gmail Developer Relations team. Prior to Google, he worked as software developer, technology evangelist, community manager, consultant, technical translator and has contributed to many open-source projects. His current interests include Google APIs, new technologies and coffee.