Between Friday June 1st and Monday 4th June, bidorbuy transactional emails did not reach more than 40,000 users.

You know what our transactional emails are. They contain outbid notifications, sales notifications, winning bid notifications, etc. In other words, they are the messages that are crucial to the functioning of the bidorbuy trading platform, for they call on users to take an action: place a higher bid, conclude a purchase, answer a question, finalise a sale, and so on.

The disruption affected Afrihost and MWEB accounts, thought apparently not all of them.

After a persistent siege of these service providers by our tech team, the issue seems to have been resolved. Almost. On the morning of June the 6th, only about twenty bidorbuyers with MWEB email accounts were still affected.

We are waiting for the detailed whys and wherefores. From what the bidorbuy IT department gathered so far, the problem seems to be in over-zealous and / or half-baked (to put it mildly) spam tools that some ISPs rely on.

bidorbuy is very scrupulous when it comes to spamming. We send email messages only to users who have opted to receive them. We go to great lengths to whitelist our email domains. We adhere to mail traffic ratios set by ISPs. We use good commercial mail servers.

And yet… every now and then, an anti-spam tool used by an ISP may falsely flag our messages as spam. As a consequence, our emails may end up not in your inbox, but in your junk folder. Or they may not even reach you.

This is a disaster for everybody trading on bidorbuy. For sellers, it can mean loss of revenue; for buyers, loss of a coveted item; and for bidorbuy as a company a decrease in turnover.

So, what can you do to make sure you never miss a beat when trading on bidorbuy? Well, you may ask your Internet Service Provider to whitelist emails coming from bidorbuy. You may switch to a reliable free web based email provider such as Google, Yahoo, Live, or Hotmail.

But most importantly, remember that emails are nor infallible.

We know that it’s great to receive “you’ve been outbid”, “you’ve won an auction”, “you’ve been asked a question”, “you’ve sold an item” etc. reminders in your inbox, but, alas, one can’t always rely on the emails to be delivered.

So, log into your bidorbuy account regularly. If you are a buyer, log in to check whether you’ve been outbid, to conclude your order, or to follow up with a seller. If you are a seller – well, you should make logging into bidorbuy a part of your routine, like showing up for work.