eBay Hacks, 2nd Edition

What to Do When Your Email Doesn’t Get Through

Use other means to contact buyers and sellers, and avoid the most common cause of negative feedback.

Email is the life’s blood of the eBay community. Sellers use it to send payment instructions to buyers, buyers use it to send questions to sellers, and eBay uses it for just about everything.

Unfortunately, there are times when your email never makes it to the other party, either bouncing back or disappearing into the ether. There are two common reasons why your email may never make it to its intended recipient:

• The other member’s registered email address is out of date. In this case, any emails sent to that address should be bounced back to you. (Note that any user can update their registered email address by going to My eBay → Personal Information.)

• The other member has an overly aggressive spam filter, which might simply delete all email from unknown addresses (including yours). The spam filter may be running on the recipient’s computer or may even be employed by the recipient’s Internet Service Provider (ISP) without his or her knowledge. This means you’ll never know if your email made it to its destination.

Warning

Any spam filter that deletes email without your approval is ultimately going to lead to a lot of trouble, and possibly some expense and negative feedback. Instead, use a passivespam filter like SpamPal (www.spampal.org) that simply marks suspicious email as spam, so that your email software (discussed in the Preface) can filter ...