Replying to an Ad-by-Email
There are no advertisers' e-mail addresses in the Ads-by-Email. Instead, in each Ad e-mail, there is a link titled "Retrieve e-mail address". Use of the link allows retrieval of the e-mail address from our web servers. This method was adopted to help protect advertisers from spammers and scammers, who "scrape" addresses from various resources and send unsolicited and sometimes fraudulent commercial offers.
To use the link and get past security to recover the advertiser's address, use the following procedure:
Near the bottom of each Ad e-mail, there is a link titled "Retrieve e-mail address". Click on that link, and a web page will open in your web browser.
Or, if the link is not clickable in your email program then copy and paste it into the address field of your web browser (Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari or similar) and press "enter" to open the linked web page. The part you want to paste in will start with "http://" and end with a number at the end of the line.
The web page that comes up is the on-line Ad listing. If the Ad does not appear, and you see a message that "The requested Ad was not found", then the Ad has been deleted from the listings or has expired.
Near the bottom of the web page, there is a button labeled "Retrieve e-mail address". Click it, and a "reCaptcha" query will appear. It is designed to distinguish between people and machines. Type the words that appear in the reCaptcha field into the form, and click the button. The email address will appear. If you get the words wrong, try again.
Clicking the e-mail address that appears opens a new message in your e-mail program, with Recipient and Subject from the Ad. If that doesn't happen because of your computer configuration, then copy and paste the name and address into the "To:" field of a new e-mail message. Then write your response, send it, and there you are.
This procedure provides some protection to advertisers from e-mail scrapers.