I have identified an issue with the procedures that PayPal follows regarding recycled emails.
I have spoken with numerous customer service representatives over the last year and explained the issue that they all agree and can see what I am saying however they are unable to help and simply tell me the procedure I need to follow. Unfortunately this procedure does not work as it is flawed and has not been thought through by the development team.
The way recycled email issues are handled within PayPal is that you have to send a particularly worded email through to [removed] who WILL NOT reply back to your email address instead all messages go through the PayPal message centre – here lies the problem.
Let me explain, imagine one day you buy your own domain name, however unbeknown to you this domain name had previously been owned by someone else may years ago and they had an account registered with PayPal. So you want to remove that association of your current email address with PayPal and the previous owner. PayPal tell you yes that’s no problem just email PayPal’s [removed] address from your email address (which is the same one that the previous owner used) however PayPal’s procedure is to send you an email back that says “We’ve sent you a reply to your email. This reply can be found in your Message Centre inbox”. That’s brilliant isn’t it, so you now have to try and login to someone elses PayPal account just to read the reply from PayPal – not so easy when they have 2-factor password protection enabled and you need to get a code sent to their mobile phone that you have no chance of getting.
So there appears to be no way of getting this issue resolved at all. Every time I speak to PayPal I get a different person and there is no other way to deal with the issue. I assume there must be a manager or team leader for the [removed] address, if humans did work at PayPal it would perhaps have been possible to speak with them or get through to someone that can actually help rather than just being told to do the same thing over and over that just doesn’t work.
Word of warning if you are thinking of buying a domain name, you need to know if that has been used previously and registered for an account with PayPal – how do you find that out, impossible. PayPal is a perfect example of what terrible customer support is!
