What to do when Craigslist emails don't work?

[marcapra]

I've noticed many times that when I email a seller on Craigslist, I don't get any replies. If he doesn't leave his phone number, you have no way to inform the seller that you're interested in his phonograph!!! Recently one seller wrote me back weeks later to say that he found my reply in his spam folder. Other collectors have told me that they have had the same problem at times on Craigslist.

[ejackett]

sometimes if you hit the "contact" button in the upper left hand
corner it will drop down with a phone # or a reg email address, at
least that has worked for me.
Gene

[Edisone]

When eager to contact but receiving no reply, I've sent extra messages from alternate email accounts (Yahoo vs my usual Verizon account, for instance) - I also explain to the person that "this is a copy, just in case my regular email addresss gets mistaken for spam". Last time I bought a machine via CL, that is exactly what happened; the just-in-case follow up saved the day ...

[Cody K]

Things that work for me: I always send an e-mail from my gmail account, that way I don't have to worry about a reply getting through Craigslist's forwarding system. And I always refer to the item in the subject line, e.g., "Your Victrola on Craigslist".

If it's something I'm strongly interested in, I send my phone number; many sellers seem to prefer this. I usually spell out parts of the number, with an explanation that bots can "scrape" phone numbers from e-mails and use them for nefarious purposes. This last thing may be unnecessary now on the seller's end, because CL recently started converting phone numbers in ads to links that you have to click on before you can see the whole number -- but I think it may still be safer when sending a number by e-mail. I also often mention that I know how weird CL can be, so I'll be bringing cash. This reassures the seller that there's no monkey business afoot.

Doing these things seems to get me a pretty good seller response rate.