Trouble with Sitesell's
SVBI! and Webmail

Question - I am having trouble getting people to whitelist their email addresses using Sitesell's Webmail system. What do you recommend?

Answer - I don't particularly like the SBI Webmail system and I don't use it EVER. I redirect everything through POBox as outlined inside your SBI Webmail account and have it sent to my personal email account

I've found that people just will not whitelist their email addresses and then send the email again.

I myself rarely go through the process of jumping through the hoops SVBI! puts in the way to contact a potential link partner or somebody else using SBI, let alone BUY something, so I feel it does severely affect your business because nobody contacts you.

My advice is to use your current email address for all OUTBOUND communications and use something like Spamarrest to capture the viruses and crap that you will inevitably start to receive as people reply.

The good thing is that if you send EVERYONE to your website's contact us page and use a Form Build It form there (here's mine www.localwebsolutions.com/local-ecommerce-contact-us.html) the SBI system will let the forms and info through no matter who they come from.

So, I recommend you use the contact us form for all communications from your site, and then get Spamarrest for your replied-to emails to block out the crap.

You have to go into your Spamarrest account and manually allow the 'real' messages through every couple of days because lots of people still won't click on the link to verify their address there either, but at least you can go in and manually release/unblock addresses, which isn't possible with the SBI Webmail system.

Here is an example of the problem...

I just sent a message to my email address at testemail@localwebsolutions.com and here's what the Sitesell SVBI system sent back to me -

Start of Sitesell message

This Message was undeliverable due to the following reason:

Your message was not delivered because the destination computer refused to accept it (the error message is reproduced below). This type of error is usually due to a mis-configured account or mail delivery system on the destination computer; however, it could be caused by your message since some mail systems refuse messages with invalid header information, or if they are too large.

Your message was rejected by webmail2.Solo Build It.com for the following reason:

Sorry, your email was refused. You may have sent it to an address that does NOT exist. OR perhaps YOUR address is not on recipient's WHITELIST of accepted addresses. 

Click on http://whitelist.sitesell.com to add your address. You only EVER need to do this ONCE. This simple act eliminates spammers since they never read messages like this, but it allows REAL people like you to pass through. (#5.7.1)

The following recipients did not receive this message:

Please reply to <Postmaster@mx.bigpond.com> if you feel this message to be in error.

End of Sitesell message

This is the same message everyone who sends you an email message at your website receives if they don't use your contact form.

From my experience, less than 10% of people receiving this challenge message will go to the trouble of visiting http://whitelist.sitesell.com to follow the whitelisting process.

In other words, pretty much nobody is going to be able (or willing to jump through the hoops) to contact you using an email address such as rocky@localwebsolutions.com (or any other email address you give out for that website) without going through a painful whitelisting process to get their message through.

Once people go through the process of whitelisting your email address, they still have to re-send the original message again because unlike Spamarrest or the other commercially available filters, Sitesell's SVBI deletes the original message from your account without you being able to access it in a junk folder or anything like that.

I did a short tutorial on how to get around this problem. You can watch it here.

Bottom line?

I use Pobox Lifetime Email as my redirect to get around the Sitesell system and Spamarrest to filter the mail from there...the few bucks a year it costs is good insurance to make sure you are receiving your email messages.