With the increasing battle against "unsolicited commercial emails", many Internet Service Providers (ISPs) such as AOL, Hotmail, Yahoo, etc are enforcing strict "Spam filters" (as well as many other types of filters such as Cookie Blocking, Advertisement Blocking, Web Site Blocking and Content Filtering, etc) onto people's email accounts or Internet browsers, as part of their standard service.
As a result, legitimate emails are also being blocked or sent to spam
or bulk folders, without your consent. This problem is not only affecting
Rentalo and its subscribers, but the entire Internet community! As a result,
we at Rentalo have been forced to better define service "boundaries"
regarding the emails we send to our subscribers. To read more about such
boundaries, please read our EMAIL SERVICE DEFINITION & DISCLAIMER
ON "SPAM" FILTERS as part of our Legal
Disclaimer.
However, it is Rentalo's best interest to assist its subscribers in resolving
issues related to "receiving" our emails. Therefore, we at Rentalo
are constantly updating this documentation to include as many tips and
hints we can find that may help our clients resolve these problems. Please
continue to read below to find some basic troubleshooting steps, and tips.
Troubleshooting 101: Find out if Rentalo is sending
you inquiries
If you signed to your account at Rentalo, click on inquiries, after selecting
your destination you should see a list of inquiries that have matched
your listing. If you see a
symbol under "Matched &
Sent" column, this confirms that Rentalo is sending emails to your
registered email address.
Troubleshooting 102: Send a test inquiry to yourself
To reconfirm that Rentalo is sending emails to you, go to your published
listing (browse the directory) and click on "Email Owner" link
to send a private inquiry. Wait about 5 minutes, and then go to "inquiries"
to check if the
symbol appears under "Matched & Sent"
column, this reconfirms that Rentalo is sending emails to your registered
email address.
After performing the troubleshooting steps 101 & 102 (above), and
seeing the
symbols appearing under the "Matched & Sent"
column corresponding to the inquiries are are generating, and the test
inquiry you sent to yourself, you have completed the necessary steps to
verify that Rentalo is sending emails to your registred email address
(in accordance with our service definition). At this time you are
not getting emails from Rentalo due to one of the following reason(s):
a) Rentalo emails are been rejected by your ISP's mail server, or
b) Rentalo emails are been trapped between your ISP's mail server and
your inbox.
Below are some more tips on how to resolve these ISP and/or end-user related
email issues.
ISP/End-User TIP 1: Contact your ISP or webmaster
Next, we recommend that you contact your ISP's technical support or webmaster
to request their help on removing Rentalo emails from your "Spam"
or "Bulk" folder permanently.
ISP/End-User TIP 2: Use another email address or email
provider
If you contact your ISP and you are still unable to receive Rentalo emails,
you should consider using an alternate email address to receive Rentalo
emails. Several of our customers have been able to start receving
our emails again by simply switching ISP or email providers. There
are several email providers (such as yahoo, hotmail, etc) that are free
and you can easily customize.
ISP/End-User TIP 3: Sign in regularly to your account
at Rentalo to retrieve & reply to Rentalo inquiries
All the inquiries (accommodation requests) generated by Rentalo are also
available online when you sign in at http://my.rentalo.com or going to
www.rentalo.com, clicking on Owners > Sign in to My Rentalo > Then
clicking on "Inquiries".
Special Note for AOL Users:
The main issue with AOL is that the default spam filtering configuration
set up by AOL is sending our messages to the spam inbox of most AOL users.
We are currently working with AOL to find a permanent solution to this
issue. Unfortunately, there is no say on how long it will take them to
fix it. In the meantime, here are some recommendations you may want to
follows:
If you need help finding Rentalo emails in your AOL account, we recommend
that you contact AOL tech support at 888 212 5537 and request help to
get Rentalo emails removed from your "spam folder". 2) We also
recommend that you add the domain of rentalo.com or at least the email
address of leads@rentalo.com to your AOL address book. By doing this you
will reduce the chances for AOL to put our future emails in your spam
folder.
Also, below is a copy of an email from a Rentalo customer who experienced
a similar problem with AOL and was able to fix it by sending this email.
The following email was just sent to AOL : "Tell us"
EMAIL SAMPLE TEXT-----------------------------------------------
I have a CRITICAL PROBLEM!
My emails from rentalo.com have apparently been blocked by AOL.
I have contacted rental.com and they advised me to contact AOL Technical
support at AOL. AOL tech support advised me to send this email to report
the problem.
Rentalo.com is a vacation rental website where we have three city property
listings. Guests search the web and find this website and then find our
listing and submit an email request to us using Rentalo's standard outgoing
email format. This source accounts for about 20% of our lead volume and
therefore is critical to our business.
Please advise me as when you will stop this block.
EMAIL SAMPLE TEXT END -----------------------------------------
Special Note for Yahoo Users:
We have detected that a percentage of the accommodation request emails
that we send to our customers may be undelivered or sent to the "Bulk
Email" folder instead of your Inbox. Please keep an eye on your bulk
folder in Yahoo and anytime you see a Rentalo email delivered there, please
open it, look for the "NOT Spam" button and click on it. The
more you tell Yahoo! that our emails are not spam, the faster the issue
will be solved. We also recommend that you set up a filter in Yahoo!
Mail to ensure they get your email messages in their Inbox. You may refer
to the Help page below for some information and general guidelines that
we have found to be crucial in maintaining good mailing lists: http://help.yahoo.com/help/us/mail/spam/spam-17.html