With the advent of social networks and instant messaging tools, email has been claimed "dead" various times in the past. However, it still sees growth on global scale and is probably the most ubiquitous Internet technology of today besides the WWW.
Most importantly, email is a decentralized and interoperable technology based on open standards. With the concept of "data sovereignty" gaining more and more importance, one might even claim that email is probably one of the first and most widely used data sovereignty technologies. As a particularly unique feature, email is the major standardized way in which the personal information space of users (Desktop, Mailbox) is linked to the public internet.
Over the past decade, the usage of email has shifted. Much of private messaging has moved to social networks and instant messaging. Email on the other hand is increasingly used for transactional information such as notifications, confirmations, orders, or reservations. One might say that email has become the "personal API" of many users. Operating this API however, is mostly a manual, arduous text-based experience, since email tools can't make much sense of most email requests.
While AI can be used as a workaround for dealing with transactional emails more efficiently, the idea of structured email (SML) is to assist email (and AI) tools in understanding email messages by adding an optional, machine-readable version of its content. Especially for transactional email, this does not require much additional effort, given those emails are anyway mostly generated from databases.
The Structured Email Working Group at the IETF is working on interoperable standards to this send. See also https://structured.email for more information.
Further information
Use cases
FOSDEM talks
- Structured Email: Building blocks and implementation guidance
- Structured Vacation Notices and Structured Email for Roundcube
- When is my flight? - Semantic data extraction in KMail and Nextcloud Mail
EInvoice use case
Invoices are a form of structured data which is commonly shared via email (e.g., using PDF attachments). Recent EU standardization has led to machine-readable standards for electronic invoices. If sent by email, this can be considered a special case of "structured" email.
We are building specialized email clients and client extensions to support this use case. See EInvoice Inbox for more information.