Events from Email Only Extracted When Schema is Correct

The announcement in MC1158908 (24 September 2025) that the Outlook feature that creates events from email is going to insist that event providers must use schema.org templates to format event information from 31 January 2026 is not unexpected. Something had to change because the current implementation doesn’t work in many situations. Some events turn up in calendars, but many do not. Something had to change to restore consistency and dependability to the feature.

The Root of the Problem

Microsoft is not the root of the problem. My personal experience is that providers are radically inconsistent with respect to the information that they include about events like airline reservations and car hire bookings. The problem has become worse recently, possibly because providers treat notification emails as an extension of their corporate branding program and therefore include a bunch of information that makes the emails prettier without making sure that the essential properties for an event are available.

Microsoft says that the current method used to extract event information from email is fragile and often fails. This leads to user dissatisfaction and many support calls. Microsoft believes that their current implementation cannot be enhanced to deal with the many different ways that event providers publish information about events. They want event providers to use a standard method, and that’s where we are heading.

The Outlook Solution for Events from Email

Schema.org is an industry consortium that publishes a reference website for structured information. According to Wikipedia, the main objective of Schema.org is to standardize HTML tags that can be used to create rich results. The solution that Outlook will introduce is to insist that the HTML information about events contained in email generated by providers like airlines, car hire firms, and so on use an appropriate schema template.

For example, the flight reservation schema defines properties like provider (the airline) and reservationId (the six-character reservation identifier assigned by the airline) together with other properties like programMembershipUsed (airline frequent flyer identifier). Populating these properties properly allows Outlook to extract the details of a flight and create a calendar event with that information. Figure 1 shows an event created from details sent by Ryanair in a flight reservation email.

Up to Event Providers to Change

Apart from deciding if they want to configure the settings to instruct Outlook how to extract events from email using either OWA or the new Outlook (but not Outlook classic or Outlook mobile), users don’t have any control over event processing. A background assistant performs the processing to check inbound email and extract event details if present. It is the background assistant that will change from January 31, 2026, and refuse to process events unless the emails containing event information comply with a Schema.org template.

Whether event providers update their email to comply with the change is entirely in their hands. I’m sure that Microsoft will do some outreach with major event providers to ask those companies to support the change and they have an email address (txppro@microsoft.com) for providers who need help to upgrade to support schema.org. However, the nature of this kind of transition is that it might take some time (or even a long time) for a provider to upgrade their systems to generate event notifications in the right format.

Microsoft suggests that customers work with event providers that they use to ask those companies to comply. I guess it might be possible for a customer to ask their major suppliers (like a preferred airline) to support the change, but again, don’t expect a change to happen overnight.

Some Disruption Likely

Given the dependency on event providers to come on board and support the new way to publish event notifications, some disruption is likely to occur, and users might find that events that previously appeared automatically in their calendar no longer show up. That’s regrettable but moving to a consistent approach is a good idea and will benefit everyone in the long run. At least, that’s the plan.

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