We recently received the following email from FlexMLS (the Greater Albuquerque MLS provider) support. If you’ve been having trouble receiving emails from your real estate broker or from your MLS portal, this could be why.
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There are still some lingering issues regarding emails not reaching their proper destination originally posted here. FBS is aware of the problem and is working toward a permanent solution. These problems affect anyone with an email address that ends with (but not limited to) @yahoo.com, @sbcglobal.net, @att.net, @bellsouth.net, @mindspring.com, and @earthlink.com.
If you have one of these email addresses 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. If your association allows you to perform this task, update your email address in flexmls by clicking on Preferences > My Profile > My E-mails 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. If you do not have a My E-Mail Addresses option, contact your local association office for further assistance.
Longer story…
Recently, Yahoo changed their email policies that prevent third party email servers from sending email on their behalf. Unfortunately, this change affected the flexmls email system as well since flexmls tries to send emails on your behalf to those who you email. FBS has been doing this all along, so when your customer gets their email the email looks like it was sent directly from you versus an MLS system they don’t know and are not not likely to trust. 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.