Background
It’s year 2024, traditionally the Year of the Dragon (or Loong, as some may term it).
By IETF BCP 47 starndards, the corresponding character is
龙inzh-Hansand龍inzh-Hant.
I came across a Starbucks promotion email advocating their new eGift card cover. It looked pretty festive, and after sending one to a friend of mine as Red Pocket (紅包) 🧧 via Starbuck’s iMessage app, I decided I’d want one for myself as well.
Yes, you can send self-addressed iMessages
Instead of going the longer route of opening up my Starbucks app and typing my email and payment info for sending myself a gift card, I decided to use the same iMessage app to send one to myself. I opened iMessage again, looked up myself from the contacts selection, and picked the email address in “iMessage blue” as the handle.
As I observed my previous self-addressed messages, I was a little concerned that if I send an eGift card to myself, I would not be able to open and redeem it from the same conversation, as the gift bubble techincally wouldn’t show up popping from the left side of the screen. However, due to some random confidence of “I can fix it later if something goes wrong”, I still decided to proceed.
I then toggled the mini-Starbucks app in iMessage, brought up Apple Pay with a Hide My Email address as the sender, and sent an eGift card bubble to the conversation with myself.
Wait, I really can’t redeem the gift card to myself from iMessage
It was not long after I had sent myself the eGift card that I realized I indeed could not bring up the “redeem” button by clicking on the bubble originating from my side of the conversation.
What do I do now? Have I just lost 5 dollars? It looks like it would sit somewhere in Starbucks’ database for forever. Oops.
I can resend eGift cards from Starbucks’ webpage
Some quick googling revealed that Starbucks provides a web portal exactly for such scenarios. To visit the portal, scroll to the bottom of starbucks.com/gift and click on eGift Support. On this portal, one can use the email address registered as the sender to verify and manage all eGift cards previously sent from the same address.
If you favor the True North, you can opt to visit and do the same on
starbucks.ca/gift. You’d end up redirected to the same management portal tho.
As of this writing (Feb 2024), the gift card management portal url ishttps://starbucks.cashstar.com/self_service/v2/register/
I went to my email inbox and copied the Hide My Email address where the eGift card receipt was sent to, pasted it to the portal, and obtained a link to manage the eGift cards that I had sent.
There I could resend the card to another email address. I used the same Hide My Email address as the recipient this time.
Receiving my belated eGift card
A few seconds later, I received the standard “Your next Starbucks visit is on XXX” email and I was able to add the eGift card to my collection. Whew.
After all, sending self-addressed eGift cards in iMessage did not seem to be an ideal idea. Meh.
