So years ago I worked for a small start-up firm that dealt mostly with affiliate marketing (read borderline scams). The company could have been something really good, but it was being held back by one significant force...the President and CEO. That is a whole different story. This story deals with the fact that with the user testing and product searches that I did back then. This was before spam and junk mail really blew up into a cottage industry. So, for a month or two on the job, I was actually filling out all of the testing materials as a user. As such, attached to my personal email account I had profiles at dating sites, Netflix, enewsletters, and various other crap. As soon as my personal email started stacking up, I quickly set up a trail of dummy accounts. Now, probably somewhere in the neighborhood of 5 years or so I still see remnants of that job. I'll get emails and snail mail mailings from Netflix asking me to reopen my membership (which, as a test, was cancelled less than 1 hour after completion...that should tell you how long data mining and user profiling sticks around on their end) and at this point since my isp switched mailing domains, I'll get mail from the old domain, but certain sites...two in particular don't recognize the forwarding while attempting to cancel the membership profile to get the hell off the list. After multiple attempts to cancel profiles on two dating sites, I finally gave up. Typically it's a once a week email to show me my new "matches" so I figured I could live with hitting the delete button twice as opposed to the half-hour I lost on hold to one of them.
Now, either one of the sites is truly attempting to get me back or someone thought an inactive, incomplete, and pictureless profile compiled in less than 5 minutes was interesting. I got an email stating I had a personal message and should log right in and check it out.
Normally I think...plot to reacquire my membership...and delete. This email, however, had a picture, username, description, and the message. So, I'm uncertain. The message is just vague enough, but they spelled the word "profile" wrong in the first sentence. So, I feel like it's not an auto send from a database, but really...would they go to lengths that great to get me to log in to the site? The other choice also not that appealing. There really is a 36 year old woman in western PA that thinks I'm "very smart and attractive" based on crap I made up to blow off stuff at work.