I’ve been casually browsing the personals ads on CraigsList, replying to a select few that pique my interest. Much to my annoyance and frustration, I’ve never received so much as a whisper of a reply to any of my enquiries.

Tonight I figured out why. It turns out that the way I’d been replying to messages: cut-and-pasting the CraigsList-specific E-mail address, subject line and message text into my Gmail web client, simply doesn’t work. For some reason the CraigsList message forwarding service refuses to forward such messages. Only by clicking on the E-mail link and using my own local mail reader am I able to issue a reply that gets through. I verified all of this by sending a few different test replies to my own CraigsList ad.

I wish the messages that I sent out “incorrectly” would have bounced though, as that would have saved me considerable trouble and vexation.