New Year's spammer fills inboxes with cheer

A strange email showed up in students' inboxes on New Year's Day. Under the subject line "happy 2008" was a simple message — "Have a happy new year" — and a link to a youtube.com video.

It was Joseph Perla '09's way of wishing the campus holiday cheer. The video showed a cat setting off a domino chain in a fireworks-shaped formation. Each message was personalized with the receiver's name, and Perla signed the email with a simple "j."

How did he do it? He said he "looked online and figured how to use the princeton.edu main site to reach out to a lot of my fellow Princetonians." A computer science major, Perla programmed the message to be addressed to each individual student and to be sent on New Year's Day.

Many students were baffled by the email, which personally addressed the recipient by his or her first name.

"At first, I felt really badly because I didn't know who he was, so I went on Facebook and looked him up," Anneliese Mondschein '11 said. "He wasn't there. Then I checked the Princeton Facebook, and there was just that tiger picture. I then figured it must have been a mass email."

Perla said he received a number of replies from people confused by the message. He thinks the briefness and ambiguity of his message were probably responsible for students' confusion, so he personally replied to each person. "I don't want confusion; I want smiles," he said.

The email certainly took Kadir Annamalai '09 by surprise. "The email didn't make me angry or anything. To be honest, I just found it strange," Annamalai said in an email.

Perla expected his friends and acquaintances to reply and hoped the email would allow him to catch up with them. So he was surprised when he "also received hundreds and hundreds of replies from my other fellow tigers, strangers," he said.

Most of the replies were very positive. One student wrote, "Sweet! I appreciate the holiday cheer!" Another wrote, "Happy New Year to you too! nice video, the cat looks a bit like mine!"

Perla did, however, receive one explicitly negative response: "a short, concerned, angry message about spamming." Perla and the irate student exchanged emails, and in the end, the student "just wanted to make sure his and others' Princeton emails stayed Princeton-related."

Because of this negative response, Perla said he won't send out a mass email again. "I'm not in the business of causing even a tiny bit of pain to one person, even if it brings a lot of smiles to more people. There are other ways to spread cheer."