Hi, I have not received any Auction Tribune emails in about a week. I checked all of my settings in BidSlammer and confirmed that the eBay searches are still current. It worked fine before. What can I do to fix this issue? Thanks, Bob

Hello Robert,
Thank you for your question about the search. While investigating this, we realized that our outgoing email quota was reached with our SMTP provider. So anything related to email (including the ticket response) wasn't working. Thank you for the heads up.
I hope this has been resolved to your satisfaction. Thank you for writing in, and please let me know if you have any other questions.

Everything seems to be working properly now. Thank you for your prompt attention.

Great, thanks again for taking time to report.

By the way, if you have suggestions for the search alert contents, this is a good time to get them in, as we're releasing some new features soon.
For example, you will be able to set a snipe directly from email now, instead of having to go to the website and enter it by hand.

Consider adding an Advanced Search option to allow filtering on item location (including country), category, condition, and the like. Drill down into the description also. Add a method to exclude certain search words. While this sounds similar to the eBay advanced search, eBay doesn't funnel the results into an email summary. This is where you guys have the edge.
In my business, I "mine" the depths of eBay looking for very specific vintage woodworking tools. I often perform searches on single categories to find tools that have high value and are of interest to my customers. Having the ability to include descriptions and other descriptive fields may tag items that might not be found by just searching on titles.

You can exclude keywords by preceding words or phrase with a minus sign, e.g. "spokeshave wood -brass", and you can also omit phrases---if you put the phrase in quotes. (-"remove this")
For countries, a "Region" pull-down would be programmatically easier. In that case, choices are North America, Europe, Asia, Oceanic, South America, Africa. Supporting countries would be tough because there are currently 190, with more being added each year.
For categories, we can put in a category pull-down of major categories for you. I also considered a number field to just search a very specific category---would that helpful?
So please let me know about
1. Regions instead of categories
2. Category number field
3. Any other ideas

I knew that words could be excluded in this fashion, but was unaware that it was possible to use excluded phrases. Thank you for this. I will make good use of this feature.
1. Yes, searching on Regions of the world would be helpful.
2. Yes, a pull-down of major categories as well as the ability to drill deeper with a category number would be immensely powerful.
3. Would it be possible to add a synonym search in order to capture more results? For example, another name for "nosing plane" is "round-over plane". If the term is too ambiguous, it might catch a bunch of irrelevant results, but it could get some that hadn't been considered. Or is this feature already built into eBay? Sometimes, the search results on eBay itself is littered with junk.
Thanks for listening. You have a great tool here.

Ok thank you for the feedback.
Here is some related trivia, if you are interested. This will make a good blog article some day.
eBay used to have a feature, "get similar searches," something like what you described. Short version: Developers exploited it. Google penalized anyone doing it. eBay banned the call. This was circa 2015.
We did so completely by accident with a different search service. Every search also listed the suggested alternatives. For example, "Star wars" led to 15 other searches like "star wars light saber." Google scraped these and it "created" something like 15,000 fake pages once the iterations were finally exhausted.
At no time did we have ill intent, but our rankings shot up dramatically. I have snapshots of that service appearing first to third place for keywords like "purse" and "shoes." So they banned it and even stopped using it themselves as there were so many exploits.
The reverse situation is true of last-second usage of last-second usage of "Place Offer." It was banned for a decade, and now they are letting us use it.

I forgot to mention - you can group terms together with commas and parentheses:
("nosing plane", "round-over plane", "molding plane") -"on toe"
(mustang, camaro) (1967, 1968, 1969) -model -toy