Received this notification from ebay yesterday. Seems a computer glitch has messed up at least one of their databases......

Dear eBay Customer,

You are receiving this message as an administrative announcement from eBay regarding your notification preferences.

You may be aware that during November, 1999 our preferences page was not accurately capturing your notification preferences with eBay. Once we realized this was occurring we immediately instituted a marketing e-mail moratorium. And, because your privacy is of utmost importance to us we have been doing a number of things to remedy this situation. However, we need your help to ensure that these preferences accurately reflect your wishes. Please take a moment to review your notification preferences at:

http://pages.ebay.com/services/myebay/optin-login.html

It is important that you take this opportunity to re-set your preferences since past settings may no longer be reflected. We apologize for this inconvenience and appreciate your patience and understanding in this matter.

We have a lot of exciting things planned this year and want to make sure that we share them with you appropriately.

Sincerely,

eBay

P.S. For a complete outline of the events that occurred regarding customer notification preferences, please visit:

http://pages.ebay.com/help/myinfo/optin-announcement.html

Notification Preferences

Please visit the Notification Preferences page and set your preferences for how you'd like to be notified by eBay.

In late October, we discovered that the Notification Preferences page, which allows members to indicate what types of emails and other notifications they want to receive from eBay, was not working as intended. In some cases, the software was not saving preference settings or changes to preference settings. Additionally, based on the layout of the page, we could not tell if a member had opted out of an email or just had not visited the page to indicate an email preference.

Very shortly after we determined the problem was with the preference page, we initiated a marketing notification moratorium, by not sending any non-administrative communications to our members, and began working to correct the page. The marketing notification moratorium will remain in effect from approximately November 1, 1999 through March 7, 2000.

We have made the following improvements:

 We implemented a more reliable method of keeping track of preferences.  We reset the default preferences for all options so that they are consistent.

 Members must indicate "Yes" or "No" for which notifications they want.

 We revised and expanded the contact choices.

As part of this effort, we reviewed members' saved preferences. If we could tell that they had explicitly changed their preferences, those settings were retained. If we couldn't tell that they had visited the page, we set the preferences to the default.

Please set your preferences now by going to the Notification Preferences page at: http://pages.ebay.com/services/myebay/optin-login.html

http://pages.ebay.com/help/myinfo/optin-announcement.html

-- Carl Jenkins (Somewherepress@aol.com), February 17, 2000

Answers

No wonder I didn't get any bids on my left kidney.

-- Ivan (workin@ntherailroadallthelivelong.day), February 17, 2000.

From: Y2K, ` la Carte by Dancr (pic), near Monterey, California

I got the same letter & clicked on their link to go fix it, but they wouldn't accept my user ID and password (which I had recorded in my rolodex. They may have more problems than they realize.

-- Dancr (addy.available@my.webpage), February 18, 2000.