In hopes to clarify the email problems happening within flexmls and to provide temporary solutions, below is information compiled from FLEX Support regarding the email issues as they are currently aware.
THE PROBLEM:
“Yahoo recently made a change to their email policy that affects how FBS tries to send emails for you from flexmls, either to your client or to yourself. When flexmls tries to send an email to your clients, the email is sent from FBS’s servers but FBS tries to mask the email so it looks like it’s being sent from your email system (who your client knows) as much as possible. FBS does this so when your client gets the email, it doesn’t look like its coming from flexmls (which they know nothing about). When Yahoo made this change to their network, they made it so only their network could send emails for their customers. When flexmls tried to send an email and the sender of that email was a yahoo email address, most networks that knew about this change blocked the email from being delivered since it did not originate from Yahoo, it originated from flexmls.
Earthlink is a different story altogether. Earthlink has different email policies in place so that if too many Earthlink customers as a whole mark email as being spam, Earthlink’s network gets protective and blocks email from that source altogether for all of Earthlink customers. Resolving this issue requires someone with an Earthlink address to contact Earthlink and beg that they unblock the flexmls email server. Normally they would do this and email would flow for a while, but if enough people marked flexmls as spam the block would be reinstated. Earthlink has taken a stance against FBS, noting that that they will no longer unblock the flexmls email server because too many Earthlink customers are still complaining that flexmls is spamming them by clicking their Spam button when receiving flexmls emails.”
Currently if the following criteria are met, emails will not be delivered if sent from flexmls:
Emails FROM YOU will NOT be sent if you are using an Email Address the matches the following:
yahoo.com, sbcglobal.net, att.net, bellsouth.net (or any other domains under Yahoo’s control)
AND
If you are SENDING TO an Email Address the matches the following, your email will NOT be RECEIVED by your client/recipient:
msn.com, live.com, hotmail.com, outlook.com (or any other domains under Microsoft’s control), gmail.com (Or any other domains under Google’s control, like Google Apps users), comcast.net, aol.com, @mindspring.com, and @earthlink.com.
These problems affect all emails coming from FLEX, including automatic emails. We are encouraging you to be cautious and verify that your clients have received your emails! The Berkshire Board will keep you posted on any new developments as they arise.
TEMPORARY SOLUTIONS:
1) “The FBS (FLEX) team is working hard to conform to these new policies as much as possible, but still keep the email looking like it’s being sent from you. Until the issue is resolved, if you are trying to send from or to addresses noted above, we suggest electing the Send mail using my local email client option (a check-box which appears at the top of the email page) to draft and send your email messages.”
“If you have an installed email system (Outlook, Thunderbird, Mail), it will launch with a flexmls link in it where you can draft and send your email.
If something that you have never seen/used before opens up, it may be that you have a local email system installed in your computer that you’ve never set up. Just exit out of that screen and look for the link below in FLEX that you can copy into your regular email.
If your email system is web-based and you do not have it installed to your computer, copy the contents that appear on the flexmls page and paste it into your own email system to send to your clients. This way, you can still get the listings in front of your client in a timely manner.”
2) “If you have one of the email addresses noted above as your primary email address within flexmls, as a temporary solution please change it to an alternate email address that does not end with one of these domain names. Update your email address in flexmls by clicking on Preferences > My Profile > My E-mail Addresses > clicking your email address entry and clicking Edit. Change your email address to a valid address that does not end in one of the domains listed above, make sure the setting “Is this your primary E-mail address” is set to Yes, then click Next to save your changes.”
3) If you are emailing forms, save a copy of the form to your computer as a pdf and email the pdf from your local or web-based email client as an attachment- skipping the FLEX emailing altogether. In order to access the pdf version that you can save to your computer, you must select print forms at the top, right-hand side of FLEX and then save it to a pdf from the print screen.