Here’s a posting I ran across on the net about the paid/unpaid dilemma on the dating sites that I have written about before.  This guy describes another wrinkle: Match seems to alter emails containing email address so that the recipient can reply outside of the Match.com system.  It does confound me how and why people would try to get around the rules of dating sites.  Goodness! The fees are dirt cheap if you join for 6 months or more.  Not bad even for a month.  Wouldn’t you pay a dollar a day for access to so many singles? 

Subject: a warning about match.com 

Hello all! 

Well, after being a paid member of Match.com for a week, it behooves me to share what some may consider a not completely honest business practice of Match.com. 

So here’s the deal. If you are an unpaid member (I fathom many females belong to this class), email messages sent to you may be altered before you receive it! I (male) sent some email messages to a couple of female members but got no response. Having a relatively high self-esteem, I wanted to test out the match.com email system. After setting up an test (unpaid) account, I used my paid account to send an email with my hotmail address in the body of the email to the test account (and CC’ed it to my paid account). In the CC’ed email, the email looks exactly as I wrote it. However, in the unpaid account, the original hotmail address became the talkmatch.com address (the address Match.com assigns to its (both paid and unpaid) members! 
Maybe Match.com specified this behavior in its member agreement (but who reads it?), but I still think the email system of Match.com is not honest in that the CC’ed message looks unaltered. I bet this behavior has caused many men to think something’s wrong with them because the unpaid females members don’t respond (unpaid members cannot send replies). 

Just something for you all to keep in mind the next time you think about signing up for an online dating service.