Email is a key part of how people get things done, whether it’s booking a reservation, confirming a package delivery, or managing a cab reservation. But as inboxes become increasingly cluttered, important transactional information often gets buried. Users are forced to open multiple emails, search through text, and manually look for key details such as reservation times, delivery status, or order confirmations. Let’s think about business travel, When users are flying out for meetings, training, or conferences, they shouldn’t have to dig through a crowded inbox to find flight details, hotel confirmations, or car service information. Technology should simplify this experience—so everything they need is right at their fingertips.
With schema.org markup, senders can structure email content in a format that can enable Microsoft Outlook to surface key information more intelligently helping users to always stay on top of their bookings, deliveries, and other critical details.
What is Schema.org?
Schema was developed as a joint venture by Microsoft, Google, Yahoo, and Yandex to provide a shared vocabulary for structured data. It enables contents like emails, web content to carry machine-readable metadata that describes events, reservations, shipments, and more. By embedding schema.org markup into the emails that you are sending, you allow Outlook to understand and surface key details more clearly to your users. The schema.org page has a repository of the schema vocabulary which you can use to build your webpages as well as emails.
Why should Providers adopt Schema.org?
- Make your messages stand out: Highlight the most important information (e.g., delivery dates, check-in times) so users can see what matters at a glance.
- Enable connected workflows: When your data is structured, Outlook can power contextual workflows like calendar event creation, follow-up reminders, or status tracking.
- Improve discoverability: Structured emails are easier to search, classify, and act upon.
- Drive engagement: Partners who’ve adopted structured markups have seen up to 30% higher engagement rates.
Supported scenarios:
1. Microsoft Outlook uses the same schema.org markup to highlight the most important information within an email and allow user to act on it. Automatically add events from your email to your calendar – Microsoft Support
2. Microsoft Outlook extracts events from booking confirmation emails- such as flights, hotel stays, car rentals, or other reservations and automatically adds them to your Outlook Calendar, ensuring employees always have the right details at the right time.”
Get Started
So, how can you give this experience to your users? The answer is simple: Add markup to your email messages
This allows Outlook to understand the key fields and surface them in relevant experiences across Outlook & Calendar. For example, if the email is about a flight reservation, you can annotate details such as the start time, venue, number of tickets, and other important information—so they appear front and center for the user
<html>
<body>
<p>
Dear Stuart, thanks for booking your flight with Scandinavian Airlines.
</p>
<p>
<b>BOOKING DETAILS</b><br/>
Passenger: STUARTMR TONGE<br/>
Airline: Scandinavian Airlines (SK)<br/>
Flight Number: SK532<br/>
From: Heathrow Airport (LHR), Terminal 2<br/>
To: Arlanda Airport (ARN), Terminal 5<br/>
Departure: July 20, 2021 – 13:55 GMT<br/>
Arrival: July 20, 2021 – 17:25 GMT<br/>
Reservation Number: NFNEV5<br/>
Status: Confirmed<br/>
</p>
</body>
</html>Marking up this email is very easy. Add the relevant pieces of information in the email body at one place at the beginning as shown in the example.
Microsoft recommends JSON-LD as this method adds the structured data separate from the HTML code. This separation allows the code to be easily reviewed. Given that JSON-LD is in a format that can be understood by humans and machines alike, it’s much easier to implement.
<html>
<head>
<script type="application/ld+json">
{
"@context": "http://schema.org",
"@type": "FlightReservation",
"reservationId": "NFNEV5",
"reservationStatus": "ReservationConfirmed",
"underName": {
"@type": "Person",
"name": "Stuart Tonge"
},
"reservationFor": {
"@type": "Flight",
"flightNumber": "SK532",
"provider": {
"@type": "Airline",
"name": "Scandinavian Airlines",
"iataCode": "SK"
},
"departureAirport": {
"@type": "Airport",
"name": "Heathrow Airport",
"iataCode": "LHR"
},
"departureTime": "2021-07-20T13:55:00+00:00",
"arrivalAirport": {
"@type": "Airport",
"name": "Arlanda Airport",
"iataCode": "ARN"
},
"arrivalTime": "2021-07-20T17:25:00+00:00"
},
"reservedTicket": {
"@type": "Ticket",
"ticketedSeat": {
"@type": "Seat",
"seatNumber": null
}
}
}
</script>
</head>
<body>
<p>
Dear Stuart, thanks for booking your flight with Scandinavian Airlines.
</p>
<p>
<b>BOOKING DETAILS</b><br/>
Passenger: STUARTMR TONGE<br/>
Airline: Scandinavian Airlines (SK)<br/>
Flight Number: SK532<br/>
From: Heathrow Airport (LHR), Terminal 2<br/>
To: Arlanda Airport (ARN), Terminal 5<br/>
Departure: July 20, 2021 – 13:55 GMT<br/>
Arrival: July 20, 2021 – 17:25 GMT<br/>
Reservation Number: NFNEV5<br/>
Status: Confirmed<br/>
</p>
</body>
</html>
Partner With Us
We’re excited to see how you plan to enhance your users’ experiences using Schema.org markup in email. Microsoft is working to support structured data in Outlook to help users take quick actions directly from their inbox.
Follow the steps below to add a new domain:
Step1: Domain identification & whitelisting
Goal: Ensure Outlook systems are authorized to process emails from the provider’s sending domains.
Partners should:
- Share the list of domains from which booking/transactional confirmation emails are sent to users ->Email: txppro@microsoft.com
- Explain your requirements- what kind of support are you looking for – Flight booking, hotel booking, car booking & parcel tracking are supported currently.
What we will do:
- We whitelist the shared domains on our end to enable schema extraction and testing.
- This will take close to 2 weeks.
- Whitelisting is a prerequisite for end-to-end testing mentioned in Step 4
Step 2: Prepare & validate the schema markup
Goal: Ensure the schema payload is correct before it ever reaches Outlook systems.
Partners should:
- Identify the relevant Schema.org fields for their scenario (flight, hotel, delivery, etc.). E.g. for Flight reservations, take reference from FlightReservation – Schema.org Type
- Map their internal data to the required and recommended schema fields.
- Validate the schema payload using the Schema.org validator.
-
- The schema can be checked for its correctness at schema.org site: Schema Markup Validator
- Add your Json block to this tool
- Click on validate to check if there are any errors or warning. In case if there is any, our system will not process these Json blocks
- If you want to check multiple blocks at once you can put it in an array format- [{Json block 1}, (Json block 2},…].
- Here is a video explaining how to use the validator tool:
Step 3: Embed schema into the email
Goal: Ensure the validated schema is correctly embedded in the email.
Partners should:
- Embed the validated schema payload into the email HTML (using the prescribed <script type=”application/ld+json”> format).
- Have the <script> block only at one place at the beginning as shown in above example. (This won’t render on the UI)
Step 4: Testing & onboarding confirmation
Goal: Validate that Outlook systems can successfully extract and process the schema.
- After successfully validating adding schema markup to the emails, send 2–3 booking confirmation emails containing the markup to schemaonboarding@microsoft.com
- Post domain allowlisting (Refer Step 1), you’d be able to test at your end and validate things end to end.
- Points to test
- Ensure Outlook settings-> Calendar->“Events From Email” setting is enabled to show “Event summaries in Email and Calendar”
- If you get a booking flight/cab/hotel confirmation emails, you should be able to see a summary card at the top of the email.
- A corresponding calendar event should have created for the booking.
FAQs
Do domains need to be whitelisted for testing? → Yes. Domain whitelisting (Step 1) is required before end-to-end testing can be completed.
Is schema validation alone sufficient to guarantee the experience? → No. Schema validation confirms correctness, but end-to-end extraction testing (Step 4) is required to validate the actual Outlook experience.
Does Microsoft support all Schema.org types? → No. Microsoft & Outlook currently supports a curated set of schema types relevant for travel and logistics scenarios such as FlightReservation, LodgingReservation, RentalCarReservation, and ParcelDelivery. Additional types may not be recognized by Outlook’s extraction pipeline even if they are validated on schema.org.
Do we need DMARC, DKIM, SPF header checks? → Strongly recommended. Failing these checks will result in sender authentication failure, which will lead to event not being generated for these bookings.
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