Thursday, December 8, 2011

How To Use The Same ID For Both Your eBay And Gmail Accounts

"Your eBay user id cannot be the same as your email address."

If that rings a bell then you must have tried changing your eBay user id or your email address to match the other with the same id -- without success.

Let's take John Doe for example. His eBay user id is "johndoe" and he wishes to use his personal email address "johndoe@aol.com" from AOL for his eBay account. However due to the rising fraud cases of scammers registering similar looking email addresses i.e. userid@gmail.com, userid@yahoo.comuserid@hotmail.com and contacting bidders directly to "close the deal" outside of eBay, this is no longer allowed.

So John Doe is now left with only 2 choices: change his eBay user id to something else or use another email address with a different id.

But before John Doe is doomed to use a second choice id, he may just have a chance at it if he is using Gmail.

We all know that Gmail offers users loads of flexibility with their accounts. Virtually unlimited storage space, superb anti-spam capabilities and countless features aside, Gmail also offers users the ability to use their email ids in 2 different forms (official and unofficial).

Form #1 (Official): Periods (or ...)
Gmail typically ignores periods (.) in user ids. That means johndoe@gmail.com, john.doe@gmail.com and j.o.h.n.d.o.e@gmail.com are all treated as the same email address and will be translated to simply: johndoe@gmail.com.

Form #2 (Unofficial): Plus (or +)
Gmail will also ignore the plus sign (+) and any following characters before the "@" sign. That means that both johndoe+janedoe@gmail.com and johndoe+ebay@gmail.com will translate to simply: johndoe@gmail.com.

Using any of these different forms, John Doe can now use the "same" id for his eBay user account and email address. All he needs to do is to enter either john.doe@gmail.com or johndoe+ebay@gmail.com and eBay will happily accept the change, and John Doe will finally be able to receive his eBay emails in his favorite Gmail account: johndoe@gmail.com.

1 comment:

  1. I tried your "Form #1" suggestion, it works.. the only problem is when you receive an answer to a question from an eBay seller, and you respond to it from your email, eBay returns the following email: "Your message to Seller was blocked, because it wasn't sent from your registered email address"

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