Oz implies 2 email addresses per account needed
By Ed | September 23rd, 2008 | Category: eBay AU | 2 commentsAn obscure and confusing announcement from eBay Australia has delivered some information regarding what they are up to in an attempt to safeguard member accounts and email addresses.
The announcement, which itself was subjected to an addendum correction, appeared yesterday harkening back to an announcement in August. The easily overlooked portion states -
If you forward member messages from your eBay registered email account to a secondary email account you should update your preferences in My eBay with this secondary email address.
For sellers running corporate Local Area Networks (LANs) this may be impossible – the emails would most likely be forwarded to internal domain addresses that not only should NEVER be exposed to the public Internet or external organisations, but also may be routed through servers that do not use Internet-recognisable addressing.
From where I sit, at a workstation behind my own business’s LAN firewall, proxy server, and mail server, all incoming email from eBay is routed to different desks based on the subject line. There is no way on Earth I am providing them with my LAN mail account details, nor would it be useful to them in the context of their announcement – incoming eBay email is forwarded from the server to more than one internal email address, so what would happen to the ones not added to My eBay Preferences?
Just another example of eBay’s propeller-heads and inexperienced management creating policies without consulting customers. As a friend likes to say, “all education and intellect, but no real world experience or wisdom”, when describing people who spent too long in tertiary education.
The worry of course, is that Oz has often been a test-bed for new technology & policies, and this could roll globally.
Ed
Worse is yet to come, an Australian seller friend says that even the seller can’t see who is bidding on their items on the new selling page, you have to click though to a second page.
From the point of pre-managing deadbeats, that’s terrible news, but from a programming point of view, I’d hope it’s just an interim solution – get the basics working, then fine tune it and enhance it.
Could be a sign that eBay programmers are starting to work smart, as opposed to trying to be clever?
Ed