ebay email

I recently tried to update my email address on ebay from hawaiiantel.net to gmail.com. Why because I'm transitioning to gmail online instead of hawaiiantel.net on Outlook Express. For one thing, they don't even make Outlook Express anymore. And I can read gmail from any computer.

So I'm changing my email address from xyz@hawaiiantel.net to xyz@gmail.com. But ebay didn't allow me to change it, saying your "eBay user id cannot be the same as your email address". Well my eBay user id isn't my email address, but it's the same prefix. In fact, it's the same prefix currently. I think I must have opened my account before they instituted this policy.

So the message is incorrect. It should say your "eBay user id cannot be changed to be the same prefix as your email address." (Even though it already is, in my case.)

Why? Apparently to decrease spammers. (But out of all my many online accounts, eBay is the only one with this annoyingly safe policy.)

But here's one workaround if you're changing to a gmail account:

If any of you use gmail or google apps, you can trick this.

for example, put yourusername+ebay@gmail.com

Google mail ignores everything after the plus, so the end result is that it goes to yourusername@gmail.com. Hehe.

Don't know if I'm going to try this yet though, since if I change it to gmail and change my mind, I can't change it back to hawaiiantel.net (or to any of my other email addresses which all have the same prefix.

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[10/29/11] I guess another way to do it is to create another gmail account and have that account forward to your regular email. For now, I have decided to forward hawaiiantel's emails to my gmail account as I want to transition my regular email over to gmail.