I always had my choice of format of the emails that I receive from ebay in Text-Only, as the HTML emails are unnecessarily huge in size and have way too much decorations. So a long time (years ago) I changed to text only and never looked back. Only once or twice I briefly changed it to "Include Graphics" in order to be able to send a couple of pictures to a seller due to some damage on the item I purchased but would always immediately set it back to "text-only". If your setting is Text-only, the system will not allow you to send pictures, even tough it has nothing to do with the format of what you receive.
Fast forward to a couple of months ago, and somehow the delivery format option seemed to have been changed by itself. I started once again receiving those huge emails due to all the added HTML which accounts for about 99% of the bulk. For example an email that was received and has 150KB size, it ends up being less than 10K after I delete all the HTML content and just keep the few lines of text with the message that are sent at the top of the email body. But after that the HTML code begins and it basically is conveying the same few lines of text but with so much formatting code that it grows out of control. Fortunately my email program supports editing of the body of inbound emails by just selecting and deleting the unwanted content between the opening <HTML> and closing </HTML> tags.
The other issue is that the size of the inbound emails from ebay keep growing very fast if I have just a few back and forth exchanges with a seller. A message that was originally perhaps 75K then grows to 200K, then 500K, and I've seen them go all the way to 1MB after just 4-5 replies. And all to send a few lines of text. Absolute madness!!
So I went into my account, communications preferences, and then edit the "Notification Delivery Format" and I found it was still set to "Text-Only" (this is a 2 position radio button type of selection, one or the other). But if for example just to try to flip it back and forth by selecting the opposite option which would be the "Includes Graphics" (HTML) option, I immediately get an error in a red rectangle that says: "Sorry, something went wrong. Please try again later." So something does not seem to be working, and its stuck in HTML even with Text-Only selected and no way to change the selection.
As I said this error was discovered some months ago and it keeps happening up to today. I am using Firefox and even tried disabling all add-ons in case something might be blocking the required action, but all the same. Even tried from a different computer and also a different account and found the exact same problem. Only in this other account the selection is stuck in "Graphics Included" and the same red rectangle with the try later warning also pops up if I try to switch the selection to "Text-Only".
So this is obviously a problem in the ebay system that I am not even sure they know about, or are just not wanting to deal with this. I wonder how many other people are having the same issue. Not long ago I spent an hour on a chat with customer support, but after I had explained all the details of this problem, I start getting the "clear your browser" or "delete cookies" standard crap they are trained to give everyone. Then when I got more technical into IT stuff terms to let the person know that I am technically proficient, it turns out they have absolutely no technical support knowledge, or even have access to that department, cannot transfer you, or even forward the very detailed information I painstakingly had provided to any ebay IT related person.
So I am wondering if anyone else could be having the same problem. It would also be interesting if you could try that same delivery format option in your account and see if the same error comes up.
For now I am living quietly with the huge HTML email crap, but if I forget to trim messages it really gets out of control very quickly. I want my TEXT ONLY option back!!!!
Thanks for any information.
