Hi All!
I've been signing up with various MSC and I've come across one or two issues that seem to reoccur: no email or SSN verification. I keep waiting and waiting but nothing changes in my status and I don't get email verification notes in my email. I checked my spam and set up the correct filters but still NADA, NOTHING, ZILTCH I'm so Does anyone have any feedback that can help me with this? The companies I am trying to get verifications from are HS Brands, Shopper's View, Intellishop, JobSlingers ExpertSolutions. Yup, that's a lot to be a coincidence right? I'm using a Yahoo email account.

I didn't have any problems with almost immediate email verification emails using gmail. However, my SSN verification took around 2 weeks. How long has it been since you entered your SSN?

I have noticed that A LOT of shop emails get caught in gmail spam even when I have said similar messages were NOT SPAM every previous day. With the number of scams related to mystery shopping, shop emails do seem to get caught quite often.

Try a different email. That's what I finally had to do in order to get the verifications. Then just forward to your main email.

I use aol mail with no problems.

I signed up for an additional Sassie platform site a few days ago, not receiving any emails from them. The other 18 I belong to appear to be still getting emails to me. At least I can access the new site, just can't add it to Jobslinger because I can't complete the email verification.

It appears that perhaps there is an issue with the Sassie platform and some of the email providers. Yahoo and Aol are fairly well known and large providers. I wish they would simply communicate with the providers and fix the filtering issue. I have a dedicated email for the MSC and I don't want to change that.

If people report email as Spam to the email providers, then the email providers start to reject all email from that sender. [That is why there are frequent exhortations in this Forum asking people not to report emails from MSCs as being Spam.] AOL and Yahoo have long been known to do that a lot. This has been discussed before, and it is also well known that AOL and Yahoo are not responsive. Just think about how many millions of email senders there are out there. There are thousands email senders just on this Forum, and each of us could decide to start sending out Spam.

The reality is that some MSCs refuse to accept AOL addresses at all because of the issues of dealing with AOL. Some also indicate problems with Yahoo. If you want reliable email, I suggest Gmail (and even Gmail categorizes some of my email from MSCs as Spam and puts it into a Spam folder, but I can retrieve it and train Gmail to view it as important to me.)

Ok, so it appears that Yahoo is placing Sassieshop.com and Jobslinger.com emails in the never-never-land of the internet and NOT in our email boxes. I think if there are a few other people that are having this problem it might be a good idea to contact Yahoo and tell them to fix that problem. I am going to give it a try, and it would be nice if there are others out there that have the same problem to also contact Yahoo. The only contact information I could find was: 701 First Avenue, Sunnyvale, California 94089, (408) 349-3300

Actually, there's been a change in the last couple of months with Sassie. I've spoken with my ISP about it and they gave me some information from their side. They believe Sassie has changed some of its coding in some of their outgoing emails, especially in the acceptance ones. I don't receive those from them at all right now if it's a Sassie platform shop. I sent my ISP an 'old' acceptance email from right before I stopped getting them. They said there was nothing in it that would cause it to become spam. He told me if I could get a copy of an acceptance email that is current, he'd see what the cause would be of why it was now being marked spam. Of course, I have no way of getting a copy.

Of note, I recently received an email from an MSC that said Sassie is aware there is an issue and is working on rectifying it. This MSC has taken to sending out their own general notice to their shoppers to tell them they've been accepted for a shop and to go check out their shop logs. So, the increase in spam may have less to do with the various ISPs and more to do with Sassie having changed something in their programming. Having dealt with similar issues in other situations in the past, I tend to think that's the case, especially since I used to get these emails without issue and now they don't even reach the spam folder.

One more thing that may or may not be at issue. My ISP told me that they no longer make that call themselves (spam vs non-spam) but that they utilize a third party specialist that actually does it. It's quite possible that other popular email sources like Yahoo etc that are larger now also utilize some type of third party, if not even this same company, and so correcting anything is extremely difficult because it's not the ISP, it's this third party.