eBay To Take A Bite Out Of Spam!
Online auction house eBay Inc. will soon start concealing the e-mail addresses of its customers, making it more difficult for junk-mail senders to harvest the information.
The new system also will make it harder for users to wrap up their deals outside eBay - and lock the company out of its fees. A new warning will pop up about such deals, which are prohibited by the company.
eBay receives hundreds of complaints each week from customers who receive unsolicited e-mail, or spam, after using the online bidding system, spokesman Kevin Pursglove said Thursday.
"It's one of the biggest sources of complaints that we get," he said.
Anyone registered on the site can currently view e-mail addresses by clicking on a seller's or bidder's username. Registration is free and takes only a few minutes to complete.
Under the new system, to be deployed over the next few weeks, users who want to contact buyers or sellers will only see the recipient's username. They will enter their message in a form, rather than send their own e-mail message.
"That message will be sent to the recipient, but the sender will not see the recipient's e-mail address," Pursglove said.
Though the company's computers are automatically forwarding the e-mail, eBay will not monitor the content of the messages, he said. And any replies to the original message will contain the sender's address.
"At that point, it is the decision of the recipient to disclose their e-mail address," Pursglove said.
The new policy was receiving mixed reviews on Internet message boards. Some suggested making the policy optional. Others feared what would happen should the company's e-mail servers crash.
"How reliable is their e-mail forwarding system going to be?" asked one user on the AuctionWatch discussion board. "I don't want e-mails that were sent an hour before the auction closed to be delivered 10 minutes after it closed."
©MMI The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed