Actually Featherlou, I registered a couple of years ago just to browse. I didnt pay to join but an old friend of mine who was a paying member found my email and contacted me. So yes even if you register your email can be found and you can be contacted by another member. All in all it was pretty cool.
Just to clarify- paying members can send messages to anyone who is registered, but the message goes through Classmates. In that message, you can give out your email address. I got in touch with a lot of my classmates. In fact, enough of us got in touch to have a reunion for which the planning started on the Classmates message board.
We planned our 30 year high school reunion on the site, and it worked pretty well, but only as well as email in general can work. Example:
I would send out an important email and people might accidentally delete it, etc. You can try to get around this by making announcements in the reunion section.
One thing that happened, which was funny in a rather ridiculous way, was when I posed the reunion schedule and mentioned that “cocktails” would be served. The censor blocked out the word cocktails.
I did connect with a lot of people I thought I’d never hear from or see again.
But the site is indeed awfully predatory, and I am not sure I will renew my membership.
Be careful of that. When they tell you that new people have registered they mean new people who went to your school, not just the ones from your class.
I signed up on Gradfinder - it is free.
There are very few people who I’d want to reunite with - so paying for that sort of service seem a waste of time.
Non-paying registeree here.
Got one email from a girl who had never been too together, mentally or emotionally. That’s been about it.
Someone signed me up – probably my mum who’s apt to do things like that. I’ve only been out of highschool for 2 years now though, everyone I wanted to keep in touch with I have and vice versa. So it’s pretty useless for me.
I’m registered but as a non-paying member. I really prefer GradFinders. I caught up to a couple of classmates and a teacher on that one, Both of them take up a lot of space on my email with “notifacations”.
I paid one year, back when it was $19. I used it to contact those classmates listed, offered my email address, and offered to connect everyone who wanted to be connected. I heard from about half my class, about 20 people. I don’t keep in touch with any really, but a couple ended up on my AIM for a while. I realized, too, that I wasn’t really interested in keeping up with them. I know you guys here more than my fellow classmates.
I hooked up with lots of people from HS. I didn’t even register until six months ago, but the other people contacted me because THEY registered. I think it was a great investment. I’m talking to four or five people regularly.
I’m in as a non-paying member. There wasn’t anyone that I wanted to get in contact with, but I figured if they wanted to find me, they could. Well, my ex-girlfriend found me and wrote me a long email telling me about her life.
In 27 years, she has been married seven times, but to “only” four different guys. A couple of them beat her up regularly. She had six kids, though she was never married to the fathers of two of them. She was only 5’2", about 110 lbs., but she became a OTR truckdriver. She then had a major accident, and turned to drugs. She was on and off coke for several years, in one case being so desperate for money, she claims she sold one of her babies.
There was alot more, but you get the picture. After I read that, I wasn’t sure if I should be depressed for her, or elated that I got out of our relationship before her life turned to hell and she took me down with her. I’m taking no chances though - I never wrote back. I’m afraid that if I were back in contact with her, I’d someday find a bunny boiling on my stove.
Thanks for all the input, peeps. I might try the Gradfinders site - I realized as I was reading through this thread that if I really wanted to stay in contact with people, I would have made a hell of a lot more effort to stay in touch with them (like, something radical like phoning them, ya know?) I don’t think I’ll blow the dough on Classmates after all.
BOTH of them?!?
:dubious:
it’s okay, folks. we’re trek geeks. this happens all the time
I joined because I found a few people I grew up with in Indiana and wanted to email them. No luck. Now, I can imagine one person blowing me off, but everyone I emailed never RECEIVED the email (I was supposedly going to get a confirmation letter when that miraculous event occurred.)
Complete waste of my money. So frustrating, too…their names are RIGHT THERE, and there was a time I COULD find old friends via ClassMates. In fact, one of my friends from back when found me on ClassMates and we reconnected–back when email addys were available.
sigh Ah well, past is past eh?
This thread got me interested in seeing what I could dig up about my grad class of 1985, Chamblee (GA) High School. And you want to know something pathetic?
Out of 69 people in my class, I don’t remember a single one of those names.
Yeah! Got somethin’ to say about that?
Of course, if their town is listed in the profile, there are other ways of tracking them down. I actually did this, and found a friend of mine from North Carolina living about twenty miles from me, here in Washington. Our friendship picked right where it left off. So in a way, classmates.com was responsible for us finding each other again, but I did all the work (especially since my friend didn’t even KNOW she was on Classmates - her sister had just put her info on, and not told her).
I don’t have any interest at all in contacting anyone I went to school with save maybe half a dozen people and I already know how to find two or three of them to begin with. My high school experience was four long years of total apathy.
I signed up for some unknowable reason after reading this thread anyway. 
Having just heard from a h.s. pal who reminded me how much we disliked some of those with whom we went to school, I’m thinking that I should gather up a group of non-reunion attendees and we could just have our own party, but without the added expenses involved in the real thing.