We became aware over the holidays that Comcast was blocking PaperBackSwap emails. That means that they would simply not deliver the email (it didn't go to the inbox or to the junk or spam folder; it just never arrived)! That included all system emails plus any email we sent in response to a feedback message.  It got pretty frustrating for members who thought we were ignoring them!

Finally, Comcast granted our request to remove the block, just yesterday.

Any email provider can do this. They will sometimes discard notifications of book requests, or notifications of Wish List offers, or even all of our emails. They don't mean to cause you inconvenience -- they are trying to control spam, and their spam-detection algorithms sometimes fail. It can be a real problem if our emails get blocked, though!

So.... if you write to us via feedback and don't hear back within 48 hours, or you get a "final notice" email about a request and you didn't get any previous email about the request, or your Daily Digest or Daily Wish List email doesn't arrive...consider that your email provider may be blocking some or all of our emails.

How to tell if you are experiencing a full or partial block:

• Check your Club Communications file (linked from the top of your My Account main page)
• Compare the emails there to the emails you have received in your email inbox.
• If some are missing from your inbox, check your spam or junk folder.
  • If you find some in your spam/junk folder, click "Not Spam" or "Move to Inbox" on them to tell your email provider that you want to receive our emails.
  • If you do NOT find the missing emails in your spam/junk folder, your email provider may be (fully or partially) blocking our emails.

To try to correct this you should:

• Add the PaperBackSwap system email addresses (librarian@paperbackswap.com and noreply@paperbackswap.com) to your email account address book or list of "accepted senders" (also known as a "whitelist"), and
• Check your "blocked senders" list if your email account has one, to be sure our email addresses are not on that list; and
• Complain directly to your email provider, so they know you want to receive PaperBackSwap emails!

While you are waiting for your email provider to correct their email mishandling, you can also

• Read the Help doc "If you think you aren't getting your PBS emails..." in the Help Center for more information
• Set any Wish List books that you want to be sure not to miss to Auto-Request on your Wish List, so you don't miss Wish List offers. You can read about auto-request in the Help Center.
• Consider using a different (different provider) email address for your PaperBackSwap account.

We're so glad to have our Comcast users back with us and getting their emails reliably again, and we hope this doesn't happen again (to any of our members) anytime soon!

Wow, thank you so much for bringing this to our attention !

This is just one example of how much control internet providers have over what we can and cannot see on the net. It is a much larger problem than only PBS emails. We should all be concerned about blocked internat content, and wary about what does and does not come up in search engine results. Internet providers have a great deal of control over information we are allowed to see and information that is blocked.

The block is back on again.   I'm not getting PBS e-mails again.

I have comcast and am not receiving any PBS emails. It is still blocked as far as I am concerned.