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Email addresses Do NOT Need to be Removed From Listings for Holiday
Posted by
Laurel
in Product News
Tuesday, Oct.07.2008, 2:38 PM PT
There's been some confusion about whether or not seller email addresses must be removed from listings before the holiday season. Let me be clear. Sellers do NOT need to remove email addresses from their listings.
We were looking at making it mandatory to remove seller email addresses as a way of keeping buyers safe from fraud. But we think we may have found a better way. As mentioned in "Anonymization of Email Addresses in Member to Member Communication," we're making all email addresses anonymous on the site and in the API, except between transaction partners. And as part of that, we were able to throw in some extra functionality too. We made it possible to send and receive messages using your existing email client.
If this is enough to keep everyone safe, we may never need sellers to remove their email addresses from their listings. We'll take another look at this in Q1 2009, and see how well it's working. If it turns out that it's necessary to remove seller email addresses to protect buyers, we'll be sure to give you enough warning that you have time to remove email addresses from your listings.
Note that some seller checklists were still showing "remove email address" as one of the checklist items. Those checklists have been updated.
I hope this clears up any confusion!
