UPDATE: We’re now in contact with Zillow on this item and hope to have a more robust solution soon. Thanks, Zillow!
As we discussed back in April, Zillow has been testing out a new email anonymizer and auto-reply system. Zillow has been turning it on occasionally since the beginning of the year. This new system appears to now be Zillow’s approach to email moving forward.
The most important thing to understand about this new system is that everything ShowMojo-related functions normally from a prospect perspective. They get our emails. They can reply to our emails. They can schedule a showing. And they must provide a real email address when the showing is scheduled.
The primary issue we (and our customers) have experienced is the sheer volume of emails generated from this new system. It sends many of the emails it receives back at the sender, sometime twice. Out of an abundance of caution, we have let those email copies flow through to our customers. We wanted to take our time to create and implement a filter that would not block legitimate emails from renters.
We implemented that filter yesterday. The good news is that everyone should now see a huge reduction in unnecessary emails from Zillow.
We recognize the filter we implemented might not screen everything. We chose to err on the side of caution, so (as mentioned above) we would not block legitimate emails from renters.
Here’s the important upshot. When you reply to a renter through one of Zillow’s anonymized emails — they look like this: zms-1000022330dd9056@reply.zillow.com — even if Zillow sends your own email back at you, you can rest assured the the renter also received your message.
And if you still are receiving a large number of unnecessary emails from Zillow’s email system, please let us know.