In my blog I was musing on the use of JSON-LD "Semantic" Email and the potential for email bots. But I wanted to try out some semantic emails for myself.

Being able to view semantic snippests in GMail is one of it's most touted features. You can see a list of their supported JSON-LD markup at: https://developers.google.com/gmail/markup/reference/

Amazing stuff. But. It's surprisingly hard to test for yourself. Firstly, you need an email account with DKIM and SPF correctly configured. Even then, you need to be whitelisted by Google.

There is an option of sending emails to yourself to bypass this. However, I found sending via GMail SMTP wasn't enough. For some reason this doesn't include valid DKIM and SPF, surprisingly. The next option was to authenticate via the API, but that was a bunch of plumbing I didn't want to do (and would be a pain for others to replicate).

So my last resort was to generate all the combinations I needed and then turn into a Google Apps Script. Right now it's shared as a Google Apps Scripts "Web App". Take a look at Semantic Email Tester.

The only snag with is it gives my script permissions to run as you. Specifically send emails as you. If you'd rather run yourself it's easy. Take code.gs directly and head on over to https://script.google.com. Paste it in and run the sendSemanticEmailTests function.

This is just a generator.

$ node index.js > code.gs

This re-generates the code.gs file, which is already checked in to this repo.

If you head over to https://script.google.com you'll be able to use this code.gs file to run the scripts.