It seems such a long time since I last wrote to you about the changes at CBD-Search regarding the use of email addresses, contact from CBD-Search, and responsibility for email delivery.

We have made a variety of changes over the past year The point of these changes is to protect our advertisers and to move some of the responsibility of the data on the CBD-Search website back on to the owners of the data; you.

The last time I wrote, I noted that we would begin to automatically delete those accounts with email addresses which have too many consecutive delivery errors. This policy is now in effect and has been running for a couple of months.

To see if we are getting error reports for your email address, log in to CBD-Search and go to 'User Details', you will see a list of the recent emails that we have tried to send you. Any error messages that we receive from your mail server will be listed here for you to correct.

If you have received our latest newsletter then this change does not currently affect you at all, but if you ever notice that you are no longer receiving any CBD-Search emails that you would normally expect, it is your responsibility to login to the site and check why CBD-Search emails have not been reaching you, and to fix the problem by entering a valid email address or contacting your ISP. If you fail to do so, and we continue to be unable to contact you, your account will be automatically removed.

If you find that your account has been deleted (but not yet purged), feel free to undelete it, but please do change your email address to a more reliable one so that it is not automatically deleted again.

As an aside, we are also considering outlawing Hotmail email addresses on our accounts. Again, this is for a variety of reasons:

• Hotmail accepts most emails without reporting back to the sending email server as to the success/failure of the delivery, or whether Hotmail intends to deliver the email at all.
• We have run tests through various ISPs and agree with what we have read on the Internet; that Hotmail only delivers approximately 80% of it's non-SPAM, no problem email. Our tests involved sending a similar, personal email to the same account(s) from the same sender email address, via the same ISP, once per day for a couple of weeks. About 80% arrived, the rest disappearing (no not filtered to the SPAM folder), seemingly randomly. When rerun with identical details, a different *approx* 80% of the same emails will be delivered.
• CBD-Search is a Resource listing Directory, and as such most advertisers have their own domain with associated email addresses. Any others that use Hotmail as a business email account should certainly look at other free solutions where they are not guaranteed a loss of up to 20% of their incoming emails.