Dear Librarian- I am not getting my Wish List notifications. I just get the email that I didn’t respond and the wish list book isn’t available anymore! Why is this happening?? — Confused in Carson City
Dear Connie,
This means that your email provider has been told not to send some categories of PBS emails to you. You were not necessarily the one who told your email provider this! Someone else could have done this, by marking PBS email as spam in their account.
If someone marks a PBS email as spam, it affects the delivery of PBS emails to all other members who use the same email provider. This is because marking a PBS email as spam tells the email provider “I have no relationship with PBS, I never gave them permission to contact me and they provide no method for me to stop receiving their emails.” So the email provider (AOL, hotmail, yahoo, etc) thinks PBS is a spammer, and they will blacklist PBS emails for all AOL/hotmail/yahoo/etc. users.
What can you do about this? First, you should be sure to add the PBS auto-email addresses (librarian@paperbackswap.com and noreply@paperbackswap.com) to your email account’s address book. This will really help!
You can also be sure never to mark any PBS emails as spam yourself; some members do this just to get the emails out of view, instead of deleting them. But you can control the emails you receive from PBS from your Account Settings:
- Use the email settings in your Account Settings to opt out of categories of email that you don’t want to receive.
- If you don’t want the Newsletter, unsubscribe to it in your account settings.
- If you ‘watched’ a topic and you don’t want the ‘watched-topic’ emails, unwatch the topic to stop them from coming in!
- If you subscribed to the Daily Digest or Daily Wish List and don’t want them anymore, unsubscribe in your account settings.
We are also pro-active about this. We have set up email feedback loops with the major email providers, to avoid getting blacklisted when members mark PBS mail as spam. So we are alerted when a member marks one of our emails as spam. If a member does this once he or she will get an email from us; if a member does this repeatedly we are required by the email provider to suspend/close the member’s account so that he or she will not get any more emails from us! And if a member marks our “Don’t Mark PBS Emails as Spam” emails as spam, this will also cause the account to be suspended/closed.
In this way, we are trying to keep the lines of communication open, so our members get the system auto-emails that are necessry to manage their accounts.
Dear Librarian- I heard about a new law going into effect this month, which requires anyone selling items for children to test them for lead content! Does this affect books swapped here (or DVDs at SwapaDVD, or CDs at SwapaCD)? How can we all test our books for lead? –Frantic in Foxborough
Dear Fran,
This law will not affect us, happily. The CPSC sent out a press release on 1/8/2009. The relevant excerpts follow:
“The new law requires that domestic manufacturers and importers certify that children’s products made after February 10 meet all the new safety standards and the lead ban. Sellers of used children’s products, such as thrift stores and consignment stores, are not required to certify that those products meet the new lead limits, phthalates standard or new toy standards…The new safety law does not require resellers to test children’s products in inventory for compliance with the lead limit before they are sold.” (emphasis added)
You can visit the CPSC website at http://www.cpsc.gov for more information, or call the following numbers for more information:
CPSC Recall Hotline: (800) 638-2772
CPSC Media Contact: (301) 504-7908
So our swapping clubs should not have a problem because of the new law, we’re glad to say.
Dear Librarian – My children like to look for books on PBS with me. When I log in, the Member Homepage comes up and sometimes there are book images on it that I am not comfortable having my children see! Is there a way NOT to show all the images in the Books Posted Today sliding display? –Bothered in Belleview
Dear Belle,
Yes! You can set your homepage to exclude any genres you like in the sliding displays. This option is available in your Account Settings, in My Account. For example, you can exclude all but children’s books, and this will keep your Homepage “kid-safe” for browsing.
COMING SOON:
- A couple of the Discussion Forums will be go back to “members only” this week…
