Email problems on Craigslist?

Have you been having problems sending or receiving emails on Craigslist? Some people have, and they have brought this to our attention. It doesn't seem to affect all the users all the time, but since we get so much great email from our readers we decided to share with you one very detailed email we received recently. His identity will remain anonymous, but you can benefit from the work he has put in to dealing with the email problems. This shows the dedication of many of our readers. This dedication to solving problems deserves recognition. As a thanks for sharing his hard work with us we have given him center stage here.

In essence the problem users are experiencing seem to be:

* Sending emails on Craigslist
* Emails being blocked on Craigslist
* Email blocking by Craigslist
* Email censoring on Craigslist
* Problems Using free emails on Craigslist (Gmail, Yahoo, etc)



I would like to share what I've learned with CL so far regarding emails not going through.

Keep in mind up until this week, I have never bothered changing IP addresses or creating virtual computers. I've deleted cookies/temp internet files occasionally but never investigated the effect it had on CL emails going through.

When starting out completely fresh (meaning never responded to a CL ad before on that computer with that IP address and with that email address), almost any email address and any type of email will go through.

Once you've started responding to many ads (75+) emails generally stop going through. It seems that even when CL catches on and blocks your email from going through they still let a few pass by, in my experience this ends up being around 1/50 to 1/100. I've learned that also the length and/or content of the email seems to play a part. If I'm responding to the services section looking for web designers, my response is usually templated and about 1.5 paragraphs long. Once the emails have stopped going through, if I respond with something like 'test' instead of a usual templated response, they seem to go through most of the time.

So, so far, the length and/or content of the email triggers something. So then I started playing around to see how much of the email I could retain and still have it go through. Instead of my templated response, I would take out but take out all but 2 sentences, then all but 3, all but 4 and so on. They would all usually go through. I tried this over and over again until I've gotten down to the point where even the difference of one sentence could trigger whether it went through or not. It seems that the length of the email matters more than the content. I haven't necessarily tried sending an email of equivalent length with completely different content.

Now in regards to email address, this has its own complexities. Lets say CL has started blocking your emails, and you create another brand new email address. With some email addresses you will start to see emails going through again, with other email addresses you will not. Its hard to really determine which will go through and which wont. I've noticed the following trends:

if you create a drastically different email address there is a better chance of emails going through

If you create a email address with a drastically different domain (ie. using a verizon email instead of a typical gmail or yahoo), emails have a better chance of going through

if you began to use a third party email app such as outlook, emails have a better chance of going through

but unfortunately all of these opportunities to send emails are short lived as once you hit around 20-30 emails sent, CL starts blocking them again. Notice how its no longer 75 to 100+ emails with the original email, its only 25+ emails. Also changing browsers does not really make a difference in my experience

Recently I was beginning to notice a phenomena that was even more strange. First of all, the way I know emails aren't going through is by two ways: 1) I create a CL post and respond to it myself. 2) complete lack of response from people I am emailing many different ads. Ofcourse the first method is much more robust.

Recently I was noticing that I wasn't getting any responses for quite some time, but when I would email my test post they would always go through. Its hard to draw conclusions from this but its strange nonetheless.

So this past week, I've experimented with deleting cookies/temporary internet files and changing IP addresses. I tested this with an email address that has already been blocked by CL. The email are going through! Its obvious from the number of responses I'm getting. I haven't experimented with creating virtual computers but I don't think this would be necessary as I doubt CL has any methods of tracking beyond cookies, temp files and IP. Also I'm not sure which is helping more, the IP changing or the deletion of cookies and temp internet files but I'm pretty certain its the IP.

Anyways, so far this all I have gathered. I will continue to delete cookies and change IP with the same email address and see how long my email keep going through. If they stop all of a sudden then we'll know that CL has blocked the actual email address despite the IP address associated with it.

I hope this has helped and I hope we come up with a solution soon!

Thanks 

Thank you for your hard work and sharing with us and our readers.