EBAY Messages - no longer able to hide email address? Ebay anonymizing emails?

[Modee]

When I respond to questions posed by members on my auctions, I would always click the box to "hide my email address" from the member. For reasons you will learn if you do tech support with me, often we don't want EBAY members to know our registered email address!

But lately, SOMETIMES (not always) this box is missing. The only two box choices are for whether or not you wish to be copied the message, and whether you want the answer posted on the auction listing.

I believe that EBAY is experimenting with trying to route all emails through their site, via a sort of anonymizer.

[Modee]

Ebay anonymous email

I think what this has to do with, is that EBAY now sometimes hides bidders’ email addresses AUTOMATICALLY from sellers until AFTER the transaction is concluded. Instead, it often substitutes a sort of anonymous email that even if you respond to via EMAIL, it simply gets routed via EBAY and dropped back into the sender’s EBAY message inbox.

BUT, once a transaction is completed, THEN, the EBAY system starts allowing you to see each others’ real, bona fide registered EBAY email address. The buyer’s real email address is also revealed to you in their PayPal payments and in the EBAY official “winning bidder” notifications.

In other words: when you respond to EBAY messages using the Yellow button

There is now not always the need to click to "hide" your email address from the recipient, because all outgoing EBAY messages are sent with nothing more than an anonymized email address these days, at least until you and the recipient have concluded a transaction.

[Modee]

Your IP address may be logged when you respond to Ebay messages via Email

Well it has happened - it is now virtually impossible to get an Ebay member's real email address (except at payment time - when a buyer pays you via PayPal or your merchant account, you do get the buyer's email address, or at least the one associated with his PayPal, or credit card). Contact between Ebay members is now almost always via Ebay messages.

Even when you receive a copy of the message in your email, it does not include the sender's email address, but rather an anonymized email address that ends in @members.ebay.com or @members.ebay.co.uk , etc. When you respond to the email, your message is routed back through the Ebay message system.

However, one should be careful nowadays when RESPONDing to Ebay Messages, via email. Since these outgoing emails, sent out in response to an incoming Ebay message that winds up in your email inbox, are routed through the EBay system, it is possible that one's IP address is logged during the process.

So, if you are running multiple Ebay accounts on your computer, be mindful of what the current IP address is at the moment that you respond via email to an EBay message - and whether it matches the IP address of the Ebay account about which you are RESPONDing to messages.

In other words, say you run Ebay accounts A , B and C, on the same computer. And the IP addresses you use (or have used) for these accounts are A1, B1 and C1.

If you receive an email in your offline email program (MAIL, Entourage, whatever) sent by an Ebay member, regarding, say a listing on Ebay A, before you click to REPLY to the email, make sure that your computer is not currently accessing the internet with IP addresses B1 or C1 (or, ANY IP addresses were ever used with Ebay accounts B and C). Otherwise, you might get your accounts linked by IP address simply by responding via email to an Ebay message - which is not a good thing, since we are all about creating untraceable/unlinkable accounts here.