Address masking has come to North America

[coxengines]

As most of you will have noticed, what has been standard practice for some months from overseas, has now been implemented in North America. Buyer questions and now forwarded as emails with masked addresses such as:

s08-ztdh79o5mr@members.ebay.com

Does anyone know if replying through one's own mail client gets the message delivered (i.e. the coded address is deciphered by eBay and the message delivered to the real email address) or if one is now forced to reply via that dinosaur called the eBay Messaging System.

2 calls to support produced two opposing answers, not surprisingly.

Bernie

[coxengines]

They are not manipulating anything on your end,

I had thought this through in the meantime.

When I hit "reply" our correct email address is displayed. What the eBay servers then do is substitute that address for their scrambled one. And they keep doing this every time mail flows.

B.T.W. that scrambled address is not valid forever and expires in a week or two.

Time to add a "Signature" to every email where our email is displayed in the body and also encouraging the buyer to use our address for further contacts.

This moronic masking is causing havoc with our search function in MS Outlook.

Bernie

[recped]

B.T.W. that scrambled address is not valid forever and expires in a week or two.

Yup that's the biggest issue that's likely to come up. On balance however the changes essentially mean never having to use My Messages on an active basis. Presumably if you do need to contact a user after the email address expires you should be able to still do it from within My Messages.