Ask HN: How is Square able to group emailed receipts? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How is Square able to group emailed receipts?

2 pointsxyst4 comments

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.

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This is done by your email client, not the sender. Here are Gmail's rules.

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 same recipients, senders, or subject as a previous message

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.

Same subject for all of them?

no its different subject depending on vendor

- "Receipt from {local vendor 1}"

- "Receipt from {local vendor 2}"

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