In my experience, Craigslist's email alerts are terrible, for a few reasons:
1. Craigslist combines listings that come in at once into a single email. That's fine, but they truncate the results (... SNIP...) if a lot of listings come in. Why? Are they worried about exceeding your incoming email size limit with an all-text email?
2. Sometimes they send emails with zero results. Again, why?
3. Maybe not an issue in NY or SF where good apartments rent minutes after listing, but even in Seattle's hot housing market duplicate listings are a big problem. I've seen the same listing posted multiple times per day for days on end. All of these listings appear in Craigslist's email alerts, so you have to wade through them all. While the author didn't address this in his bot's code, I see filtering out duplicate or "already seen, not interested" listings as the biggest benefit to a home-made solution like this.
>I've seen the same listing posted multiple times per day for days on end
My landlord's property manager actually does this with the place I'm renting now. Every 3 hours the previous ad would be deleted and a new one with the exact same content would pop up in its place, obviously to stay on the front page. I thought it was a scam at first because surely that's not what normal landlords do? I did my due diligence that it wasn't a scam (which I would do anyways) but I was super, super suspicious. Turns out real landlords do that.
1. Craigslist combines listings that come in at once into a single email. That's fine, but they truncate the results (... SNIP...) if a lot of listings come in. Why? Are they worried about exceeding your incoming email size limit with an all-text email?
2. Sometimes they send emails with zero results. Again, why?
3. Maybe not an issue in NY or SF where good apartments rent minutes after listing, but even in Seattle's hot housing market duplicate listings are a big problem. I've seen the same listing posted multiple times per day for days on end. All of these listings appear in Craigslist's email alerts, so you have to wade through them all. While the author didn't address this in his bot's code, I see filtering out duplicate or "already seen, not interested" listings as the biggest benefit to a home-made solution like this.