Email hack from angelist angel.co

Very often I receive or send an introduction email to two parties, either for a general introduction or to help solve a specific problem. Usually it’s the two parties being introduced who need to chat, and not me. So I do what I’ve seed to be the common pattern and asked to be moved to bcc so that when they hit reply all I am taken out of the chain. I also do the same when someone introduces me, and It’s clear that the introducer shouldn’t be in on the continuing email chain.

Here’s an example:

Intro Email pattern

Today however I received an intro email from angel.co (Angle list’s return email) and in the email they did something very clever. their email is below. When I hit reply all (which I did lazily as a guaranteed way to include the other person in the email) there was no sign of the angel.co address in the to or cc fields.

intro email that doesn't include sender's email in the reply-to field

They did this by manipulating the reply-to header in the email chain. It may be an old hack or an old trick, or even part of the design of the email standard to begin with. But I’ve never manipulated the reply-to field before and this is absolutely a great way to handle emails connection between two users. Not only is the other part in the email chain, and the send is not on reply-all, it also works for regular reply. Here is an edited version of the headers. I also noticed that mail was processed by SendGrid, so maybe this is actually a feature of sendgrid’s email management service, but in any case, I think it’s brilliant and clever.

Subject: Intro - Ashley, Someone (Example Company)
From: AngelList Talent <talent@angel.co>
Date: 1/16/14, 3:05 PM
To: Ashley@Raiteri.net, someone@example.com
Return-path: <bounces+13051-3f53-ashley=raiteri.net@send.angel.co>
Envelope-to: ashley@raiteri.net
Delivery-date: Thu, 16 Jan 2014 18:05:17 -0500
Received: from o1.send.angel.co ([74.63.231.121]:55752) by ...
Received: by mf227.sendgrid.net with SMTP id mf227.26522.52D865A98 Thu, 16 Jan 2014 23:05:13 +0000 (UTC)
Received: from angel.co (ec2-50-18-6-138.us-west-1.compute.amazonaws.com [50.18.6.138]) by ismtpd-026 (SG) with ESMTP id 1439d4d1dc8.12bc3.5ed92 Thu, 16 Jan 2014 23:05:13 +0000 (GMT)
Reply-To: Ashley@Raiteri.net, someone@example.com
Message-ID: <52d865a95d6ac_e2638aff4444aa@job01.tmail>

X-Spam-Flag: NO
Reply-to: Ashley@Raiteri.net, someone@example.com

New match: Introducing Ashley to PersonName at Example Company
You're both cc'ed on this email. You should both reply and set up a time to connect.

Ashley Raiteri
Technical Advisor on Scalability, Data Science, Product and Funding

Should I put my savings in Bit Coin?

A friend of mine asked what I thought about this post on BitCoin?  

http://falkvinge.net/2011/05/29/why-im-putting-all-my-savings-into-bitcoin/  While the Author of the post has a lot of good common sense arguments for why Bit Coin is a good investment, I decided to create a simple flowchart to help my friend figure out whether he should do something similar.

I’m rooting for Bit Coin, becuase I love it’s disruptive potential.  But as far as I can tell, there is no penalty for adopting Bit Coin late.  Being an early adopter might provide for a financial windfall, but the primary benefits of Bit Coin are not as an investment scheme.  If they were, then it would just be another Pyramid scheme.  And, well, I’d never advise anyone to buy into a pyramid scheme at any level.

UPDATE:  Modified flow chart to include POKER TOURNAMENT as an option in Both Paths.

 

Google is NOT too big to innovate

flydini FAST

Recently There’s been a lot of muttering as of late about Google being too big to innovate, and this is the reason Top Talent is jumping to Facebook.

But that ignores the simple fact that sometimes it’s much EASIER for a large company to innovate.  At Everbread, early on, before we had much of a product, we branched some flight routing code to generate a Flights exploration tool and skinned, launch a private Beta product called Flydini.com (the site is no longer active, but I’ve added some old screen grabs)  It was never meant to be a product, just a few days of coding to explore some ideas, and a week or so of design and UX work.   Continue reading “Google is NOT too big to innovate”