Craigslist is like an abusive spouse.  The more you love it, the more it beats on you.  Today, thanks to a sharp user, I realized that Craigslist has started blocking all emails coming from NotifyWire.com.  That means the NotifyWire feature to respond to ads doesn’t work anymore, don’t use it.  Instead, click the button to open the ad in the default browser and reply to the ad as you normally would.

In hindsight, I should have seen this coming.  Despite the fact that I made this feature in an attempt to eliminate scam ads set up to auto respond to anyone who replies, Craigslist, in their infinite and infallible wisdom has decided that people are better off being subjected to this kind of spam.  Really, Craigslist should set up a similar system to mine, but…ah, crap, I don’t want to go there.

So what now?  Now I’ll make it easy to reply to ads, but you’ll have to do it with your own email address, not one shielded by NotifyWire.  It will take a few days to rebuild this in a way that works well.  I could use a “mailto” type of link that will launch your default email client…but most people use online email and don’t know how to redirect their default mail client to the online one.

I could also ask for your email credentials, but then I have to worry about encryption, etc…  Most likely, I’ll go with the “mailto” with an easy setup option to redirect to major online email accounts like gmail and yahoo mail.

And there goes 40 hours of development time down the drain.  Thanks Craigslist, may I have another.