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Posted by David Sherman [24.32.202.83] on Wednesday, March 31, 2010 at 13:37:02 :
In Reply to: Is the .fr France? posted by Chriscase [76.224.242.184] on Wednesday, March 31, 2010 at 13:08:47 :
Yes. The ebay international sites have their own "local" top-level domains. I sold a fair bit overseas and have even bought some stuff from Britian, Russia, and Eastern Europe. I think the deal is this. When someone makes an inquiry via ebay, unless they check the "hide my email address" box, ebay forwards it to the seller as if it came from the person's actual email address. At that point, if I reply to them via normal email, all the communication is hidden from ebay. However (and this is what I'd have to check out), it seems that ebay is allowing people to set up regular email accounts AT ebay (or a forwarding service through them), rather like all the yahoo and gmail accounts. Once they do that, they now have a hook where they can check and see how is emailing TO one of "their" customers, and they can see if it appears to be coming FROM one of their other customers.
I don't have any problem shipping to foreign countries so long as they pay through paypal or gold coin of reputable mint, and I add a buck or so to cover the hassle of it. I used to ship surplus parts to foreign countries until somebody put the fear of God into me about possible violations of the Commerce Control Act and that I was supposed to have some license for everything I exported. I figure things that were never part of anything military would not be an issue, though. For some weird reason I sold a lot of Aladdin lamp chimneys and mantles to Japan, a bunch of bolts to Italy, and I still ship a lot of 24 volt light bulbs to Canada. In this case it was a deck of cards the French guy was inquiring about.
I guess I'm convinced it was a legitimate ebay message. It did not include any of the usual fraudster clues like bad English, links to fake sites with cleverly-distorted URLs, or attachments of "forms" to open. Besides, there have been many times that I've read ebay's "help" instructions for how to do something, and found that somebody has changed the software and the things the instructions said to click on weren't there any more.