Making Date and Time Text in Email Selectable for "Add To Calendar"
We will be sending out daily Event Alert emails (via Mandrill) containing the date and time of upcoming events.
We are having difficulty getting the date and time text to be consistently recognised by email clients as a valid Date & Time, so that the text in email, on both mobile and desktop, is easily selectable to Add to Calendar (example of what we're looking to achieve attached). Mostly it appears to be unrecognised text. Note: we have tested reordering the formats for the time/date text, but cannot achieve consistency.
-> The type of text we are sending in our email:
Jason Pearl
Founder & CEO at Heyo
Thu, Feb 04, 2016 01:00 PM EST
TECHNOLOGY
->example of an event related email that does work:
Your assistance would be GREATLY appreciated!
Paul
I believe clients such as iOS Mail and Gmail look for the "When" and "Where" or "Location" keyword.
So... "When: Thu, Feb 04, 2016 01:00 PM EST" would work... except it only works for future dates, so since today is Feb 5 a better example would be...
When: Thu, Mar 03, 2016 01:00 PM EST
The only solution I've found is providing a download link for a icalender ( .ics ) file.
Also, I suspect this is the most bullet proof as even Litmus uses a icalender download link for their webinar schedule.