A tale of email

Punya Mishra

I received the following e-mail one day.

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From: "Pinky" <pinkys4in@yahoo.co.in>
Date: Thu, 2 Aug 2001 18:49:13
To: <punya@msu.edu>
Subject: Hi !!

Hello Sarita Bhabhi,

thank you for sending me the link to the www.ematchforyou.com matrimonial site.. it was really very very helpfull .... and i found quite a few matches for Anu who we are now talking to...

how is Ramesh bhaiya? please give him my regards and wish him ll the best for his new job.

by the way... where did you learn about http://www.ematchforyou.com ?

have you tried looking for someone for Amit?
i think you should.... its a very fast and easy to use. And the girls are very pretty too. They have a photo album where you can see the photos of all the girls and boys and then contact them. You can register for free on
the site very fast.

Hoping to send you good news soon.
take care... write back soon....
Pinky

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Now I didn't know why this email was sent to my address. I did not know anybody by the name of Pinky nor were any of the people whose names were in the email familiar to me. My first response was that I had either received this email by mistake or that I had forgotten who these people were.

So I forwarded this email to my wife, Smita asking her if she knew who these people were. Just as I was about to click the send button, the real purpose of this email hit me. And I marveled at the ingenuity of the people who had sent this message out.

I realized that none of these people were real people. This message, masquerading as a very mundane, everyday email message was in fact a mass email message, a message that had gone out to lots of people, many of whom like me had opened it and read it, and were wondering just who these people were.

Note the mistakes, the missing capitalization, the typing of "ll" for "all" and "helpfull" for "helpful" as if the person who had typed this message did not know typing (a common problem in India) or had typed this message in a hurry. Of course, all these mistakes in a funny sort of way made this email feel more "real" and "credible."

Now factor in the "peeping tom" factor that made me (and possibly others) read this message even though I (and all the others who had received this message) had realized that this message was for someone else.

So this was an email from a nonexistent person, taking advantage of the know vagaries of the Internet to spread the word about ematchmaking.com. If the same message had gone out as a regular advertisement (Dear Reader, we would like to introduce a new matchmaking service... and so on) I would have deleted after scanning the first sentence. I had received such emailings in the past (and continue to do so), as I am sure everyone with an email address has. This is one of the costs of having an email address. However, these spam email advertisements are often ignored.

Now here was an endorsement from someone I did not know, but who clearly seemed like a real person, someone like me. A similar endorsement in an advertisement could be ignored as being untrue but who would deny the validity of this endorsement! This was real!

What the people behind ematchmaking.com had realized was that a standard mass emailing would not work so they came up with this idea. A very brilliant idea at that, and one that made me read it in its entirety and think about it. I wonder how many people were duped by this message to actually go out and check out the website, and how many then then actually used it.

I wonder what other strategies companies will come up with next to make us read their messages.