Do not use any symbols in an ebay message. It will be blocked

[serendipity*sales]

After spending 30 minutes attempting to send a message through ebay messages to another ebay user, I figured out why I kept getting the following  error message:  

Access Denied  You don't have permission to access http://www.ebay.com/cnt/ReplyToMessages on this server.

The error was cause because I used an equal sign and the inch symbol in a sentence explaining mm and inches.

Well, ebay sees this as a potentially cryptic attempt to contact someone illegally!

Watch out!

[eburtonlab]

Thanks for posting that -- I had not heard of such a prohibition before, or getting the Access Denied error for a message that contains prohibited characters.

I do know that scammers often use special characters to make it harder for eBay and others to detect or filter out common scam text phrases, but this is the first I have heard of a message being blocked merely for having an equals sign in it.

If you see an email or a message with special characters between every word such as equals signs or periods, or using international characters to substitute for regular alpha characters -- all the "a"s have accents and all the "c"s have cedillas -- typically that indicates that someone is trying to bypass a spam filter.

Scammers have likely already figured out how to get around such a filter by using different characters, so this sort of rule will likely only impact users sending totally innocuous messages, unfortunately.

[blueglories]

Yup - same thing happened to me ... never happened before in all my years. Crazy.

Taking out % symbol didn't help. So I went back and also removed $ symbol (they sent a $2.00 offer for a $15.00 item that had free shipping - so yes, completely legit to use $ symbol) which may or may not also be allowed now, because at the same time I removed ( ) symbols (as you can see, I like to use them), AND I removed "ebay" from my message (was trying to explain fees to a newbie buyer so that was also legit). So not sure which ones are OK or not ... maybe using a combination of them triggers their algorithm.

Finally - message accepted - without: $, ( ), %, or "ebay"

Which, of course, solves nothing except create hassle for the majority while trying to put a leash on the minority. Typical eBay.

[coffeebean832]

tyler@ebay- It looks like the filters could use some work. Could you ask the team to review this?