And maybe this doesn’t belong in GQ
No
Well crap I hit submit by accident.
Okay so I’m not a paying member of match.com which means I can’t email people. I thought that if a paying member emails you, you can still write back even if you’re not. I got an email and wrote back but it got returned. I’d like to email this guy back and I could try the free trial but I could’ve sworn you could write back if someone wrote you first.
Again, sorry if I’m in the wrong forum or it doesn’t belong at all.
Seems as good a forum as any.
I would think that the fact that your email got bounced back was prima facie evidence that you need to sign up
Some services do work that way, but IIRC match.com does not.
In my experience, Match.com doesn’t work at all. Makes for some really good stories, though. … 
Well, poop. I could sign up for a free trial so I could email him back and include my real email address. Except for the ‘free trial’ you give them your credit info anyway. If you don’t cancel before the 3 days are up they charge you for a month. I guess I could do that and email him and then cancel it like 10 minutes later.
I’m only so confused about it because I had someone email me from it before. He was a member, and I know I emailed him back. I don’t recall if he sent me his real address in the message though. Oh well. Thanks everyone!
I’m glad you asked, I’ve been wondering about this. So is it standard practice to include your “real” e-mail address in your message when you respond to an ad?
That used to be the case, but they weren’t making as much money as they could if everyone involved had to pay.
Let me be the first to suggest OKCupid.com - it’s entirely free, and the matching seems to be every bit as sophisticated as those pay sites, if not more so.
Indeed. I enjoy okcupid a lot. Seems to be skewed fairly young, but I’ve never spent much time on any of the other sites so I don’t really know. Completely free to message, to put up a profile, pictures, to chat, whatever you want. The tests are pretty interesting, and their matching seems pretty good.
In my experience, the answer is “no” – you’re not expected to disclose your e-mail address until you’re comfortable with the idea of exchanging real-world information. How soon people do so varies: some guys have told me their e-mail address in the first message they sent me (but I kept using the anonymous mailer until I was ready; they might not have cared about me knowing their address, but I cared about them knowing mine!), other times it takes a few exchanges before one of us will advance an address.
IMO, the only “rule” with these services is to do what you’re comfortable with. 
I checked it out the other day, and before I knew what was happening I’d created a profile. :eek: I agree that the membership seems to skew a little young, and that the tests are kinda fun.
The main thing I don’t like is that when I do a search, I can’t filter out certain things. They give me the option to filter by race or religion, neither of which I care about, but they can’t let me weed out the smokers? :dubious: (No offense meant to any smokers, it’s just a personal preference.)
I also don’t like that people completely ignore the “you should message me if…” things that I put in. If it keeps up I’ll probably delete my profile, because I hate being torn between ignoring someone and being annoyed that he didn’t really pay attention to my profile.
Yeah, I know about the smoker thing…I think maybe there might be a question that you answer that could decrease your match score with smokers, but it would be nice to filter by any of the criteria that they list.
People do ignore the “message me if” thing, moreso if you’re an attractive lady. Most of 'em just ignore me though.
But seriously, keep with it, it’s fun and at least cool to meet people to chat with on. So…who are you?
OK, thanks. I was just wondering if it might be standard practice for women to put up free profiles, and only the guys pay to send messages.
If you go through a lot of the questions under “answer questions”, you should run into questions about smoking. I kind of like the way it lets me set strong preferences but few absolutes.
By the way, what do you have under “you should message me if…” that people are ignoring? I’m just curious. Most people seem to have pretty vague, generic statements in there.
It’s important to know that even the “Mandatory” really isn’t. Thier matching assigns a point value to everyone’s answers based on how important they are to you. The Irrelevant is 0, a little important is 1, somewhat important is 10, very important is 50, and mandatory is 250. So if we answered one mandatory question differently, but 5 very important questions the same, we’d “break even,” so to speak.
I’m interested in continuing this conversation, but I think we’ve ventured well off-topic and outside the GQ purview. If you’d care to follow me over to IMHO, I’ve started a thread called "On-Line Dating, Cont’d.
FYI, be careful about the “free” trial subscription. I was a member of match.com, and intended to let it lapse after a year, so was surprised to find them charging my credit card for the 13th month. They hide an “auto renewal” clause in their agreement, and when I called to have them take the charge off, they made it sound like they were doing me a big favor by allowing me to get out of “my commitment,” i.e. the fine print they slipped by me a year earlier.
They may slip crap like that into the trial membership deal.