Well after looking long and hard at several “Anti-Spam” issues we have discovered with the saved search notifications feature in WPRealty, we are considering a set of new feature that will allow for custom RSS based links and social media updates to solve this.  What happens is this will make WPRealty a bit more modern in terms of tracking saved searches and other types of notifications.

What is happening that makes email notifications ineffective?

People are hosting their WPRealty site on an endless inventory of different hosts and as such, some limitations are just not beneficial to a Realtor type website. What is happening is this; If you have a WPRealty website and someone saves a search for update notifications, servers are ending up black listed and emails are getting caught by anti spam tools before the notifications reach the in box.

Is this a problem exclusively with WPRealty? Absolutely not! The problem goes something like this.  Many web hosts limit the max emails per hour a site can send out and in some instances we are discovering that they can be set as low as 50 emails an hour. It gets worse. Many web hosts do not have properly configured PTR records among other optimal email settings. This can force emails sent out on bulk to get automatically filtered as spam in some instances.

What is the solution for auto update notifications of saved searches?

The solution from our perspective are four unique approaches which I’ll itemize below.

1. RSS Subscribe to Saved Searches based on your criteria.
   This is a new feature we are planning to follow our short code RSS generated feature that will allow members to save searches and then access those saved searches via RSS. How it works is simple. You save your search and you simply add the RSS feed to your MS Outlook or other RSS enabled email client and each time you press Send / Receive you get the updates.  You can also have your website clients add the feed to their iGoogle account.
2. Opt into update notifications twitter style
   Social media features are the next on the list of features we most want to complete and some of them will be specifically designed to provide update notifications to members of your WPRealty empowered website.
3. iPhone app.
   On of our favorite features we have planned is an iPhone application that will tie into your WPRealty site that you can distribute free of charge to your visiting clients. In fact, you could require the downloading of the application by your client in order to receive updates if you so desire.
4. iGoogle and Facebook is another avenue we are planning development for.
   With iGoogle and Facebook, your clients can opt into features within the website for a broader social networking integration.

These new features are planned for sometime in June or July and take a back stage at this point only for new client resource management features and short code enhancements now in development.