Ask HN: How is Square able to group emailed receipts?
I setup my square account to automatically send receipts to my e-mail if I pay a Square enabled vendor with a specific card. I notice when I receive the e-mails from Square, they are grouped nicely into a single conversation.
I inspected the e-mail headers and couldn't figure out how either Square is sending the e-mail so that my e-mail client knows to group them into a single conversation or thread.
What's even more neat is that if I have multiple e-mails connected to my client, and square happens to send e-mails to 2 or more of those accounts. In the "All" view, I would see the e-mails across different accounts in a single thread.
4 comments
[ 1.6 ms ] story [ 22.8 ms ] thread- "Receipt from {local vendor 1}"
- "Receipt from {local vendor 2}"
Emails are grouped if each message meets the following:
- The same recipients, senders, or subject as a previous message
- A reference header with the same IDs as a previous message
- Sent within one week of a previous message
https://support.google.com/mail/answer/5900?hl=en&co=GENIE.P...
The recipient is the same (me@domain.com)
The sender is the same (messenger@messaging.squareup.com)
But subject differs depending on vendor. I could get emails from square with these subject lines:
- “Receipt from {vendor1}”
- “Receipt from {vendor2}”
- “Receipt from {vendor3}”
Which does lead me to suspect it’s a header as the Google docs indicate. But the headers in each message are different.
I compared the messages to a group email convo I created between ‘me@domain.com’ and ‘me@gmail.com’ to compare and couldn’t find any similar header. There was a “in reply to” header but that same header was not found in square emails
> Sent within one week of a previous message
I have gone 1-2 weeks without interacting with a square enabled vendor in the past, so I don’t think this it.